November 2011 Spotlight: Danielle Macedo
Danielle Macedo works with Dr. Gil Rosenthal and graduate student Brad Johnson. Last year she worked with Brad in a project for the NSF’s Undergraduates in Biomathematics (UBM) program where they looked at how morphology impacts fast-start swimming performance in swordtail fish, an anti-predator response common in fish. She will be presenting this work at a conference at the University of Houston for the UBM program. This semester, as work for both UBM and the TAMU Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program, she will be trying to find correlations between geographic range and morphology in Xiphophorus malinche, X. birchmanni, and their hybrids. These two morphologically divergent species converge in central Mexico and produce polymorphic hybrids, while preferring different elevations. They are therefore trying to determine whether these morphological differences are related to the varying geographic range.
Danielle grew up in Recife, Brazil, a city that is located in coastal northeastern Brazil and contains a small fraction of the Atlantic Rain Forest. Being exposed to a complex coral reef system from a young age and having the rain forest in her backyard really opened her eyes to how fascinating and exciting biology can be. Her school in Brazil took them on field trips to ecological reserves, which spiked her interest in how the organisms they saw came to be, how they adapt to their environment, and what people can do to help preserve their habitat. She attended two high schools in Texas, Abilene High School and Whitehouse High School. She graduated from WHS in 2013.
The research projects she has worked on have shown her that she really likes research. She plans to attend graduate school and get a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology, in the field of marine biology.
She plans to present a poster of the research she conducted this summer at the TAMU System Pathways Symposium. She conducted a multi-locus analysis of depth-related population divergence in the protobranch bivalve, Deminucula atacellana, at the University of Massachusetts – Boston, as part of their NSF REU in Integrative and Evolutionary Biology with Dr. Ron Etter. She is also hoping to spend the spring semester in Brisbane, Australia, at the University of Queensland, and hopes to participate in marine biology research while there.
