Kathleen Dobbs

she/her
Undergraduate Fellow
Mosquito Team

How did you get here? What brought you to Tyson?

I’m an ecology and evolutionary biology major at WashU. I’m also an anthropology major, and during the year, I work in a biological anthropology lab. I wanted to get more field experience, with an organism other than apes, to see if I’m more interested in general ecology and evolution, or if I want to specifically focus on apes. I like to study how human-induced environmental changes, like urbanization and climate change, affect organisms. That’s what I do with apes during the year, but that’s also what we’re doing with mosquitoes here.

What is something that your team has accomplished together this summer?

One of the things I like most about the Mosquito Team is how collaborative we are. We have many long, long meetings where we go over everyone’s projects and do experimental design together. For my experiment, I am looking at two different mosquito populations, one from Pennsylvania and one from New Orleans. They're both the same species, Aedes albopictus, and I'm looking to see if there are inter-population differences in their responses to different temperatures and humidities, which I am testing using microclimates at Tyson.

What might other teams not know about what your team is doing?

Our team is in every sort of situation. We’re in the lab a lot, we’re in the field a lot at Tyson, and then we’re in the field in the city. In the city, we’re doing a host-seeking experiment. We go and stand around with our aspirators, and see if the mosquitoes are out. And we’re correlating that to temperature outside, to see when they’re most active. This is also informing Lauren’s study — she goes back at night to see if ALAN [artificial light at night] is causing them to host-seek at night.

What do you do outside of Tyson?

During the academic year, like I said before, I work in a biological anthropology lab. I also TA bio lab, which I love. Beyond that, my big club is Alpha Phi Omega (APO). When I became VP of Service for APO, my big focus was on environmental service. We would work in community gardens, and do a lot of work in the Brightside [St. Louis] greenhouse in Forest Park. We’d do Green Team at the Cardinals games, promoting recycling. We also come to the Tyson honeysuckle removals. In my free time I love going to concerts, spending time in Forest Park, and napping with my cats.