Souls of SOLS, October 2025

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

Ernest Boampong – Environmental Life Sciences

Like many other scientists who work with insects, Ernest Boampong has loved chasing and catching butterflies and beetles since he was a kid.  

He continued pursuing his interest in entomology when he started at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana. But he quickly turned towards studying an insect he’d never been interested in before: mosquitoes.

“Growing up, mosquitoes were never in mind, because they transmit diseases – no one wants mosquitoes around. It was all the fun bugs that I was interested in.” 

But what makes mosquitoes a nuisance is exactly why Boampong studied them.  

“In Ghana, we have a lot of malaria cases, which results in death,” the second year PhD student explains. “Growing up, I witnessed a lot of malaria incidents myself. I even had a couple of malaria attacks when I was young.”  

In his third year of school, Boampong did an internship with Ghana’s National Malaria Elimination Program.

“It was great. I got to see in real time how the Program was trying to control malaria in Ghana,” Boampong remembers.  

He loved the experience so much that he went back to work for the Elimination Program for five more years after he finished his undergraduate degree, during which he also earned a master's in public health from the University of Ghana. During those years, he investigated which insecticides were the most effective at killing mosquitoes in regions across the country and also led entomological surveillance in Ghana.  

Now that he’s at ASU, Boampong is doing similar work, but in an environment much different from Ghana’s tropical climate.  

“We would expect not to find mosquitoes [in the desert], but unfortunately, we’ve modified the environment such that we have a lot of mosquitoes here [in Maricopa County]. If that is the case, how do we control them?” 

Working with Silvie Huijben, Boampong has started investigating the insecticides most commonly used for mosquito control in Maricopa. So far, he’s found that “most of the mosquitoes are highly resistant to the insecticides that are available now.” 

Because it takes a long time to develop new insecticides, according to Boampong, that means Maricopa County should invest more in alternative methods to control mosquitoes, like applying larvicides to mosquito breeding sites and intensifying public education so more people help clear pools of standing water that the insects breed in.  

Though he hopes to return to Ghana, Boampong is glad for the opportunity to study here.  

“It’s a really great opportunity to be working here at ASU,” he shares.  

“I’m exposed to different professors and seminars and I’m able to interact with other colleagues in this field. It’s really helped move me into the researcher that I’m becoming.” 

Kaitlyn Daugherty – Mollecular and Cellular Biology

Since Kaitlyn Daugherty took high school physics, she’s been determined to go to outer space. 

“I’ll do literally anything,” says the second-year PhD student. 

But rather than heading to the Air Force or studying rocket science, Daugherty is studying what happens to microbes when they enter space.  

Daugherty spends her days putting bacteria like E. coli and salmonella through replicated conditions of spaceflight, like simulating microgravity by keeping the bacterial cultures constantly spinning. The point of that research is to help understand how infectious diseases spread on space stations to protect astronauts and others who might travel to space as the opportunities for spaceflight expand. 

“We bring microbes into outer space, and we know that microbes grow differently in outer space,” Daugherty explains. It's important, then, to understand the way those microbes grow in space to be able to prevent and treat the infectious diseases they cause.  

When she was entering college, Daugherty knew that becoming an astronaut required lots of competition. So, she sought out a less conventional route to get herself to space: rather than being the pilot, she hopes to be the person making sure the pilot won’t get sick. 

Daugherty set off on that path as an undergraduate at Embry-Riddle Aeronautic University in Daytona Beach, Florida, where she studied aerospace physiology.  

“I describe it to people just as pre-med but in the context of like, astronauts and pilots.”  

Then, when it was time to pursue graduate school, Daugherty only had a select number of labs to choose from.

“Aerospace engineering is huge of course, but life sciences and space isn’t really anywhere,” Daugherty says.  

One of the few labs that combines her niche interest is Cheryl Nickerson’s lab at ASU BioDesign. Nickerson was once a finalist for being chosen as an astronaut herself and continues to be well connected with NASA microbiologists.  

Daugherty knows she wants to build on Nickerson’s work studying how the conditions of space affect the dynamics of how pathogens spread. But she’s still figuring out how exactly she hopes to study that.  

“There’s 80 million avenues I could go down,” she jokes, “I’m in awe of all the things that I could do.”