My Research

Grad school is supposed to get less overwhelming eventually, right?

Ok, good. Just checking. Classes are actually not bad! It's just everything else that's the problem: reading papers to be caught up in my field. Finding papers to be caught up in my field. Meeting with my advisor. Emailing XYZ person about their research/training/meetings. Keeping my assignments straight. Finding time to do dishes/laundry/house-cleaning.

This weekend has been a long spate of procrastination (which is why I'm blogging and not working on a fellowship application), but good! I had my lab mates over for dinner and studying last night, which was a lot of fun. And now that my stipend is figured out (long story short, the Grad College dropped the ball and my monthly income came in a week and a half late), I can go stock up on sweaters because it's cold here already! Nothing too exciting going on here otherwise.

So, I've said a lot about the kinds of research projects my lab does, but you're probably wondering what I am actually doing in lab. I mean, all I'm doing right now is working on the California tribe samples, but surely there's a bigger project for me in might, right? Surprisingly, we should already have a thesis project idea. I was not expecting that. Luckily, I found something that I'm really interested in!

My project (as of now - things can change!) is studying dog domestication in North America.

Dogs? Not what you were expecting, right? Doesn't the lab do humans? Didn't I want to do research on humans?

Well, yes. But DNA analysis is DNA analysis. My professor has worked with macaques before, and one girl in lab is researching capuchins. And my research is related. There's a huge Native American ancient city called Cahokia near St. Louis that is being excavated. And in one of the nearby sites, they found 40+ dog skeletons! All of them predate European arrival in North America, so they are 100% Native American dogs. And some of them have viable DNA, which is awesome.

The current plan is to study these dogs to see where they came from. Did they come over from Asia with humans? Or did Native Americans domesticate North American wolves once they arrived? The last study done suggests that the dogs migrated over from Asia, too, but that was ten years ago and nobody has really looked into it much since then. It will be interesting to see what results I come up with!

Dogs are an interesting problem, I think, because they're so weird. Genetically, I mean. Any dog breed you can think of is only about 200 years old. So all of their history before the Victorian-era breeding craze is a little muddy. Working with old samples gives you a (slightly) clearer view of how things were before humans did too much meddling with dogs. There are a lot of other really interesting things about dogs that I've learned all the way, but I'll leave those for later. :)

Have a good week!