Jennifer Gleason - Undergraduate Research Mentor

Bio:

Name: Jennifer Gleason 

Department: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Describe your research/creative scholarship in a few sentences that we can all understand: 

I study the evolution and genetics of behavior in fruit flies.  Despite being so small, flies have complicated behaviors and, with over 3,000 species in one genus (Drosophila), we have plenty of variety to sample.  My lab members are I are trying to understand both courtship behavior and aggression in flies. With respect to courtship behavior, we examine how the use of different senses (particularly hearing, smell and sight) changes among species so that males and female can identify the right individuals for mating.  For aggression, we are testing how different resources affect how much a fly is willing to fight.

Questions:

Q: How did you first get interested in doing research or creative work?

A : I can’t remember a time that I wasn’t interested in science.  I became interested in my field when I first learned about molecular evolution in an anthropology course in college.  Realizing that I could combine genetics with animal behavior let me to my research area.

Q: What do students in your discipline learn by doing research that they wouldn’t learn by just taking classes?

A: Much of animal behavior and evolution is based on fundamental concepts that any student of biology can grasp.  Combine that with the ease of manipulating Drosophila and students can quickly develop their own experiments.  Students in my lab move quickly from an experiment planned by others to ones that they plan themselves.  This allows students to design experiments and, with a few exceptions, they don’t have the opportunity to do that in classes.

Q: What do you find to be the most exciting part of doing research or creative work? What makes this line of work meaningful and interesting to you?

A: The questions we can address are always exciting.  When we test hypotheses and get unexpected results, that always leads to new questions.  Even when we get expected results, there are still more questions because of limitations of the methods we have to use.  There are always new experiments to be done. 

Q: What advice do you have for undergraduates interested in doing research in your field?

A: My advice is to always try new things and to not get discouraged.  So many times when we do an experiment we realize halfway through, or even at the end, that the experiment isn’t quite designed the right way, despite our best efforts at designing the experiment in advance.  You have to be willing to adjust and start over.  You have to try new things and develop your own methods sometimes. At the moment, everyone is contributing ideas to solve a particular problem we want to address and we are being creative by using different objects found around the lab to build new assays.

Q: For many students, doing research or a larger creative project is the first time they have done work that routinely involves setbacks and the need to troubleshoot problems.  Can you tell us about a time that your research didn’t go as expected? Or about any tricks or habits that you’ve developed to help you stay resilient in the face of obstacles?

A:  When does research go as you expect?  There are always surprises.  We recently did some experiments in a new species (to the lab) of fly in which we wanted to know if females chose between familiar and unfamiliar males.  The first time we did the experiment we realized that females were selecting against the male we had marked, which meant we had to find a new way to mark the males.  We repeated the experiment and then realized, when the females always chose the familiar male, that we hadn’t accounted for male social experience.  As a result, we have been pursuing new lines of inquiry. I didn’t used to work on aggression, but these experiments showed me that I need to understand aggression in this species.  At the moment we have so many more questions that it feels like we are further from answering the original question.  Still, we are gaining insights into evolutionary processes so we are learning more than we expected. 

You have to be persistent in research and cannot take failures personally. I know it is a cliché, but every failure is a learning experience. When experiments are successful, you need to celebrate every data point.  Share your successes with your lab and celebrate your lab mates’ successes as well.

Q: How do you spend your time outside of work?

A: Outside of work, when I’m not spending time with my kids (a KU first year undergraduate and a high school junior), I sing in the newly form Bales Choral Society, volunteer with the local Girl Scouts, and play Granny Basketball.