Biology Graduate Student Uses Technology to Develop Tools for Research and Science Outreach
Last summer, biology graduate student Zach Fuller traveled to Kenya on a National Geographic–sponsored research trip to study bee genomics. This trip was a departure for Fuller, who has spent much of his graduate study analyzing data on a computer rather than collecting samples in the field.
“It was a brand new experience for me to go to Kenya and perform field work,” he said. “There was a lot more work involved than I had imagined to collect honey bees.”
Lucky for Fuller, he was traveling with seasoned fieldwork professional and former biology graduate student Jeff Kerby (now a postdoctoral researcher at Dartmouth University) with funding secured through National Geographic’s Young Explorers Grant. Because Kenyan honey bees were dealing with pathogenic stressors better than American honey bees, Fuller and Kerby were working with Penn State professors Webb Miller and Christina Grozinger to collect samples and sequence Kenyan honey bee genomes to try to determine why. You can read the trip journal Fuller and Kerby kept at
beenomics.wordpress.com.
New technology has made it easy and low-cost to sequence entire genomes, so Fuller has spent most of his graduate study analyzing these large sets of data as a member of Professor of Biology Steve Schaeffer’s lab.
“The amount of data we can produce is massive, so the majority of my work is done on the computer where I develop software and tools to analyze and find patterns in these large datasets,” he said.
Fuller studies both large- and small-scale types of genetic variation and population dynamics that alter the structure of chromosomes using fruit flies as models.
“I am interested in how and why this variation can change over time,” Fuller said. “There are still so many fun- damental questions we don’t know the answer to in population genetics.”
Fuller is still analyzing honey bee genetic data from his Kenya trip last summer. Right now, he is sequencing a variety of viruses that were widespread in the samples he and Kerby collected.
“I am currently sequencing the viruses present in these samples to identify new viruses that we didn’t know were present in Africa,” he said.
The research group working on the Kenyan honey bee genome project, including Fuller, Miller, and Grozinger, published a paper in BMC Genomics on the first part of the work, titled “Genome-wide analysis of signatures of selection in populations of African honey bees (Apis mellifera) using new web-based tools.” This publication joins two other papers Fuller has published on genetic variation in fruit flies.
Outside of the lab, Fuller is very involved with science outreach activities. He, along with fellow biology graduate students Allison Lewis and Christopher Thawley, developed an iPad application called The Evolving Project, which consists of a short interactive game that teaches people about mutation and evolution by hav ing them trace over a shape on the screen that Fuller describes as “a giant game of Telephone played on an iPad.” Fuller created the application to make part of his research accessible to a general public audience.
He also collaborated with Lewis and Thawley to create a class called BIOL 497-004: Science Outreach and Communication. The trio used their experiences communicating their research and performing outreach activities to teach other undergraduate and graduate students in hopes that they might be inspired to do the same with their own research. The first class was held during fall semester 2015, and this fall Fuller and Lewis will teach it with Chad Nihranz (as Thawley has graduated and taken a
postdoctoral researcher position at the University of Rhode Island).
Fuller counts the GenoMIX student group and the Department of Biology Graduate Student Association among his other extracurricular activities, serving in various leadership roles for both organizations. He also has won a slew of awards, including the Troxell Award, an NIH-funded Computation, Bioinformatics, and Statistics Training Grant from Penn State, and being selected as a finalist for the Society for the Study of Evolution’s Hamilton Award.
With his research, outreach, and teaching responsibilities, Fuller keeps busy and challenged doing what he loves.
“Every day is a new challenge and it is constant problem solving,” he said.