Lauren Johnson

PhD Candidate, Team Skeet

Fourth-year PhD candidate Lauren Johnson joins Tyson for her second consecutive summer of fieldwork (and first summer of leading her own team). Her project aims to identify trends of female mosquito egg-laying behavior, larvae development, and diversity in response to artificial light at night across 19 St. Louis City and County sites over a two-year span.

“I love getting to go out into the city and learning more about different neighborhoods in the city. My research aims to characterize the urban environment and how mosquitoes behave in it, not just along one transect, but across all the heterogeneity that occurs from neighborhood to neighborhood. This is my first year leading a team, and it’s so fun to take students to parts of the city that they don’t normally get to see day-to-day.”

How were you able to establish connections with people who were willing to hold mosquito collection buckets in their backyards?

“It’s a pretty big ask to put out buckets that will inevitably attract more mosquitos to people’s yards. But so many people are super into science in St. Louis. I ended up talking to the Living Earth Collaborative at WashU, which connects people doing work related to biodiversity and conservation. Last summer, in just two days I had over 60 people interested in my first project characterizing nighttime biting activity of mosquitoes across areas of the city that differed in their intensity of artificial light at night. So I used those connections to recruit sites for this new long-term study. Once you have a good working relationship with one person, you get access to their entire network, which is how I’ve gotten more people who aren’t directly a part of the scientific community. I want to show my students that people are eager to help them succeed in their projects and that you don’t have to be nervous to network to get your research done.”