Souls of SOLS, October 2024: Highlighting Graduate Student Stories

Two side-by-side images. On the left, a smiling woman with glasses. On the right, a smiling woman on a boat.

Sofía González Salazar, on the left, is a PhD candidate in the Evolutionary Biology program. Ashley Foster, on the right, is a PhD candidate in the Environmental Life Sciences Program.

Risa Aria Schnebly
October 22, 2024

Note: This story is part of an ongoing series profiling graduate students in the School of Life Sciences. See September's featured students here.

Sofía González Salazar – Evolutionary Biology PhD

To the average person, thinking about mites is not a pleasant experience. Sofía González Salazar, though, is not the average person.

The fifth year PhD student has dedicated years of her life now to studying the tiny creatures, and even has a mite tattoo on her chest. She smiles dreamily at the mere thought of them: “They’re like little aliens that exist in our own world. I love them.”

Salazar studies the populations of mites that exist in the sky islands of the Sonoran Desert. “Sky islands” aren’t really floating islands, but they’re close. The conifer forests on Sonoran Desert mountaintops are geographically isolated; once you descend the mountain, you’re back in the uninhabitable desert. That makes those little patches of forests essentially like a series of floating islands that species would have to hop between to migrate.

A woman in glasses smiling in front of pine trees.

Tens of thousands of years ago, the sky islands were connected by conifer forests that covered the region. But as the region turned into desert, the species that lived in the forests took refuge in high altitudes. By looking at what mite species live in the sky islands, Salazar can begin to guess at how different species of mites migrated thousands of years ago.

But Salazar isn’t just trying to figure out the past, she’s interested in finding out what mites exist in which parts of the sky islands in the present. Though that might sound like a straightforward question, it’s something that no other scientist has done before; the microscopic mites have been understudied and overlooked.

“A lot of people don’t want to work with [mites], because they’re not the most important thing in terms of medicine or ecology,” Salazar explains, “That means there's a lot to learn.”

Salazar has been fond of overlooked creatures her whole life. As a kid who identified with animals, she dreamed of being a veterinarian, and practiced for it by pretending to “cure” the ants and bugs she’d find in her front yard –– “at least, I thought I was curing them,” she laughs.

Then, as an undergraduate studying biology at the University of Sonora in Mexico, she read a book by Anita Hoffman, the first Mexican acarologist, or mite researcher, and Salazar’s fascination with mites was born. She also realized then that acarology, for some reason, is a rare woman-dominated field. The idea of joining a legacy of women studying these strange, overlooked creatures was irresistible.

When she’s not looking at mites, Salazar spends much of her time serving her communities. She serves as the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Representative for the School of Life Sciences’ graduate student government. She’s also the founder and coordinator for the LatinAmerican Graduate Student Asosieichon, which gives Latinx students at ASU a space to meet, connect, and find mutual support. No matter how lost she likes to get in the microscopic worlds of insects, she always comes back so she can show up for people, too.

Ashley Foster – Environmental Life Sciences PhD

When Ashley Foster was an undergraduate at the University of San Francisco, residents of Flint, Michigan, lost access to clean water due to inadequate treatment and testing of the city’s water sources. Many of the city’s residents faced health problems due to ingesting water contaminated with lead and other chemicals, all while the city continually insisted that the water was safe. Foster, who was studying environmental science t the time, watched the crisis unfold from the other side of the country, angry and looking for ways she might be able to help.

“I remember my friends and me just like obsessively talking about that for hours and hours and then, later on, I realized I had gotten the skill set to study water sciences.”

A woman in a black jacket sits on a boat on Saguaro lake.

Foster now studies water quality in different bodies of water in the Phoenix area, including Tempe town lake, Saguaro Lake, and the Phoenix canals. She primarily assesses water quality by studying what species of algae grow in those bodies of water, where they grow, and how much of that algae might be harmful. That helps her make predictions about the consequences of algal blooms, which can release harmful toxins into the source of Phoenix’s drinking water, as well as the water that many residents fish and recreate in.

The city of Phoenix performs certain water quality tests several times a year, but Foster believes they could be doing even more: “[The city is] sampling to get seasonal changes, which is super important, but I also think the frequency of sampling needs to increase in the future.”

Foster hopes her research can help fill an important gap that the city has not addressed, and push for more regular water monitoring across the US, rather than only monitoring after a crisis like Flint has happened. Additionally, Foster hopes that she can become a trusted source of environmental quality information for local communities –– a role that she sees science and government as sorely lacking.

“Growing up in Black communities, I know there’s a lot of distrust about anything the government says, especially related to the health of the environment we’re living in. There’s been so many atrocities of the government allowing water sources and air sources to be heavily polluted and saying zilch to people, like at Cancer Alley and Love Canal. And so, I know it’s important to establish myself as a trustworthy source for environmental knowledge.”

Foster has done her fair share of community advocacy work already. In the past, she’s served as the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Representative for the School of Life Sciences’ graduate student government. She’s also a member of Earth Systems Science for the Anthropocene graduate scholars network, which brings together scholars who are studying science to bring solutions to people, and who value inclusion and justice. Foster participated in a Salt River History project with ESSA, which brought together diverse forms of knowledge about the Salt River to educate local people and advocate for creating a healthier river ecosystem in the future.

Evolution

Water

Deserts

Soil

Souls of SOLS: Highlighting graduate student stories

Allison Hays, left, and Isabel Torres, right.

Risa Aria Schnebly
April 29, 2024

Note: This story is part of an ongoing series profiling graduate students in the School of Life Sciences. See March’s featured students here.

The research that goes on in the School of Life Sciences spans a huge and fascinating variety of subjects. The graduate students who make up SOLS are no less diverse or interesting, arriving at their respective research from different places and with different passions. Here, we recognize a handful of these graduate students, their work and what motivates them to pursue it.

Allison Hays – Neuroscience

Our childhood experiences have a huge impact on the rest of our lives; they shape our beliefs about the world, the relationships we form, and our physical and mental health well into adulthood. Allison Hays, a second-year neuroscience PhD student in the BEAR Lab, is diving deeper into understanding how our experiences are so impactful by exploring their interaction with genetics.

Hays specifically thinks about how childhood experiences affect certain cognitive functions, like the ability to remember things, pay attention, and switch easily from one task to another. But rather than looking at the brain to figure this out, she looks at our spit––the easiest way for her to get samples of DNA. When she looks at spit samples, she doesn’t just try to read the DNA they contain; she’s more interested in seeing how the DNA within them is being regulated. Specifically, she looks for occurrences of DNA methylation, which is a modification that prevents gene expression.

“We don't have all of our DNA being expressed at one time. There are things that turn gene expression on and off, or up and down.. So, what we look at is not necessarily what genes you are given, but what genes are on, off, up, down, etcetera. So that's then going to affect... your biology, your health, and cognition. I specifically think about how stressful experiences can be associated with poorer health and different rates of development and aging- which may ultimately go on to impact a variety of things.”

So, Hays measures the cognitive performance of her research subjects, assesses how stressful their early childhood experiences were and looks at what genes are turned on or off in the DNA in their spit samples. With all that information together, Hays can start to understand how early childhood stress can change gene expression and affect cognitive performance.

This holistic look at stress, genetics and brain function altogether excited Hays, who conducted related research with the Arizona Twin Project and the Memory Attention Control lab at ASU as an undergraduate. Now, she’s conducting novel work that she hopes will one day improve how scientists assess and improve humans’ health and wellbeing.

“I think it will be extremely important for assessing people's level of health risks depending on their childhood stress levels, and monitoring whether any types of treatments or interventions are working... By looking at the gene expression, we’ll finally be able to see on a genetic level which treatments are working and which are not.”

Isabel Torres – Environmental Life Sciences

Arizonans might think they’re well-acquainted with the desert, having lived among its summer monsoons, soaring temperatures, and temperamental dust storms. But most Arizonans have no idea why the desert is important.

Not Isabel Torres. The second year PhD student in the Throop lab is dedicating her research to better understanding deserts and other dryland ecosystems, which most people have overlooked.

“Deserts are amazing. People think that there's nothing living or going on there. But there's so much activity.”

A third of the world’s human population already lives on drylands, or ecosystems like deserts defined by water scarcity, and that number will only increase: by the end of the century, drylands will likely make up 56% of Earth’s land cover, Torres explains. To protect the people who depend on drylands, scientists must understand how to best manage and care for that land. But that’s not something they currently understand.

Torres plans to help correct that. She’s spending her PhD doing field work to study how carbon cycles through dryland ecosystems, which is important for scientists who make models that predict what the climate will look like in the future. Current climate models for dryland ecosystems rely on data collected from other ecosystem types, which is troubling –– it means that those models are inaccurate. Torres aims to generate data that can be used to make accurate climate models, which will help land managers take care of the land.

That goal, Torres shares, is inspired by her hometown: “I grew up in El Paso, Texas. It’s a desert. But it wasn’t always a desert. Back in the 1800s, it was a grassland. It was pretty and beautiful. But then they overgrazed the landscape, leading to desertification... So, I’m really interested in land management practices and how we can take care of the land.”

Torres recognizes that living on drylands is tough: water and other resources are scarce, so people must work to prevent desertification where they can. At the same time, she loves the desert, and though she knows life there is tough, she doesn’t want that to stop people from seeing how much the land still gives us. She hopes her work can help people protect the land in return.