Big Questions, Big Experiences - Part 1

The Wyoming Research Scholars Program turns undergraduates into full-fledged researchers. 

 

By Micaela Myers

 

In 2015, the University of Wyoming Science Initiative launched the Wyoming Research Scholars Program (WRSP), which pairs undergraduate students and faculty mentors to participate in cutting-edge research. 

The majority of practicing scientists as well as many corporate and civic leaders credit early research opportunities in college as having a profound effect on their career paths and personal growth. WRSP offers students these same benefits. So far, 280 UW students have participated. 

The program helps attract and retain top students with generous stipends for research and travel to conferences. In addition to the individualized student-led research, participants learn writing and presentation skills, present at UW’s annual Undergraduate Research Day and participate in public outreach events. 

UWyo Magazine sat down with 10 scholars and their mentors to learn more.

 

Sweet Dreams
Gustavo Hernandez came to UW from Rock Springs, Wyo., to major in physiology with a plan to become a medical doctor. Figuring research would help him on his path, he joined the WRSP, working with Associate Professor Emily Schmitt in the Division of Kinesiology and Health’s Circadian Rhythm and Exercise Research Lab. 

“We work with circadian rhythms, which are your 24-hour sleep-wake cycles,” Hernandez says. “If you have poor circadian rhythms or misalignment or disruption — say, from working overnight jobs or traveling — it leads to a bunch of bad stuff like cardiovascular disease, cancer and metabolic disease. We are seeking to find a solution through exercise.”

The three main controllers of circadian rhythms are light, food and exercise. Exercise is the least studied or understood. Hernandez is using different treatment groups of mice to determine the benefits of exercise on circadian regulation. So far, early results show exercise is indeed beneficial to circadian rhythms. They are also studying the upregulation and downregulation of certain genes to understand which pathways are activated and what activates them. 

The lab includes expertise from disciplines including zoology, physiology and neuroscience, and much like the lab, the WRSP program brings together students from across campus who are interested in research. 

“Any opportunities that we have to elevate our students, to give our students real-world application experiences and to prepare them for the next step are exceptional, and I think UW does a really good job providing these essential opportunities,” Schmitt says. “I was really fortunate to have wonderful mentors throughout my schooling and my early career, and mentoring is one of the favorite parts of my job. Mentoring students is really how we make a lot of these scientific discoveries. Students are the ones in the lab doing the work. Getting a group of students together from different disciplines and levels allows them to bounce ideas off of each other and their instructors.”

Schmitt believes that research will also help Hernandez, as a future medical doctor, understand a bench-to-bedside approach and the years of research that go into drug and other treatment discoveries. 

“I think mentorship is super important, especially for first-generation students and first-generation Americans such as myself,” he says. “There’s a lot of things I don’t really know, and it’s been super helpful to have someone who knows.”

After graduation, Hernandez still plans to apply to medical school. However, his time in the WRSP also helped him appreciate the research side — something he also wants to pursue. 

 

Understanding Impacts of Salinity 
Miles Milbrath came from Durand, Ill., to study fisheries management and joined WRSP. After graduation in winter 2024, he stayed on for his master’s degree. 

“I think every undergrad, if they’re interested in science to some degree, should do undergrad research where they’re in charge of managing a project and doing their own methods, lab work and writing up a manuscript to have it published,” Milbrath says. 

And that’s just what he did. This past fall, Milbrath was the lead author of a paper titled “Evaluating How Growth and Diet of Native Freshwater Fishes Change in Response to Salinity and pH in a Semi-Arid Landscape” that appeared in the international peer-reviewed scientific journal Fishes. The paper was co-written by graduate student Audrey Lindsteadt and Lusha Tronstad, who serves as the lead invertebrate zoologist for the Wyoming Natural Diversity Database and is also an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Zoology and Physiology and the Program in Ecology and Evolution. 

For the project, Millbrath studied fathead minnows and northern plains killifish in intermittent streams around Wyoming. 

“Freshwater fish ideally like a salinity that’s low and a pH that is neutral,” Milbrath says. “We’ve found streams that are double the salinity of normal ocean water in the middle of Wyoming. Using the fishes’ ear bones, called otoliths, we can understand how much effort they’re putting into their growth each year. We also studied their stomach contents to correlate the salinity and the pH with what they’re eating. There’s a lot of variability with the diet, but less energy was directed toward growth with higher salinity and a pH that’s more basic.”

Milbrath has another soon-to-be-published paper with Samantha Poratti, a master’s degree student studying native mussels near Bear River, Wyo.

“I’ve been doing this job for 16 years, and Miles is only the third undergraduate I’ve worked with who has had the determination to be the lead author of a paper,” Tronstad says. “They learn a lot in the process of writing a paper, and I think it’s excellent to contribute knowledge globally on something they put that much effort into it.”

These types of undergraduate research experiences weren’t available when Tronstad was in school.

“I am a huge fan of WSRP,” she says. “It allows students to use everything they’ve learned in their degree and put it together to make something that they can be really proud of. It will follow them all of their careers.” 

Milbrath now mentors a WRSP student himself. He hopes to one day work for a fish and game department in fisheries management and believes his WRSP experiences will give him a leg up. 

“Understanding the implications and effects of lack of water on these fish is important,” Milbrath says. “It was a pretty small-scale project, but it does have broader implications. There are a lot more sensitive species like trout that are affected by different salinities and pH. Lack of water, the pooling of water and not being able to escape these harsh environments is applicable throughout the West.”

 

Studying Stars 
Many students enter college unsure of what they want to study. That wasn’t the case for Alexina Birkholz of Sheridan, Wyo.

“I decided around sixth grade that I wanted to be an astronomer,” she says. “By the time I started UW, I knew I wanted to either study black holes or exoplanets.”

Her freshman year, Birkholz visited Department of Physics and Astronomy Associate Dean Chip Kobulnicky’s office hours, eager to join the team at the Red Buttes Observatory studying exoplanets. With WRSP funding, her dream was soon underway. 

“WRSP helps students have a job in their field so they can reduce the hours they work off campus,” Kobulnicky says. “A project like this gives UW students a chance to join an international team using NASA satellites to look for planets around other stars, which is an awesome opportunity for Wyoming students.”

WRSP brings all scholars together for workshops and training. 

“It really allowed me a broader perspective on how science in general works — and not just astronomy,” Birkholz says.

As part of Kobulnicky’s group, she spends hours running the telescope every week working on a team that verifies new exoplanets.

 

“I teach younger students how to use the telescope, I run our schedule and make sure that we have all the targets for the night entered, and I do a lot of general telescope maintenance,” says Birkholz, who is now a senior. “Professor Kobulnicky is a role model to me. When I have my own students, this is how I want to interact with them.”

As part of the research group, Birkholz learned how to collaborate in a large highly productive team. 

“Science teams today are big collaborations with people at different career stages,” Kobulnicky says. “It’s a whole group of people who help each other, work together and learn from each other and from each other’s mistakes. And that’s kind of the way science works.”

Through these collaborations, Birkholz is now a co-author of three papers related to new exoplanets. One of the papers, titled “New Giant Planet Discovered: TOI-6383Ab,” was published in Simple Science this past summer. It details a new giant planet called TOI-6383Ab that orbits the star TOI-6383A located about 172 light-years from Earth. Classified as an M3 dwarf star — a small and cool star — it is part of a category of planets known as Giant Exoplanets around M-dwarf Stars. The discovery helps astronomers learn more about how giant planets form and evolve around smaller stars.

“I’d like to go to grad school and get a Ph.D. working on exoplanets as well as work on designing astronomy instruments,” Birkholz says. “After I get a Ph.D., the next step is usually a postdoctoral position, and then I’d like to either end up working as a professor or work for NASA.”

 

Looking at Leaves 
Paleobiology Professor Ellen Currano is a huge fan of the WRSP program — for its student salaries, its coverage of conference travel and equipment, and its training and mentorship.

“Our undergraduate students who are going through WRSP are getting accepted into really top graduate programs — Ivy Leagues and Big Ten schools, the big research powerhouses,” she says.

A top graduate program is exactly her hope for current WRSP and NASA Space Grant Fellow Samuel Robertson of Laramie, a senior majoring in botany with an entomology minor. Robertson came to UW with an interest in biology and plants in particular. He joined the Currano Lab in 2023, helping graduate student Matthew Butrim with his project using machine learning networks to automatically identify and extract the different features of leaves. Robertson then designed his own research project studying the correlation between plant leaf traits and soil moisture. 

He spent nine days trekking around the Snowy Mountains collecting aspen leaves at 40 sites. The leaves were then measured and studied for dryness metrics. The project ties into the other Currano Lab projects. A range of measurements were then taken on the leaves, and Robertson tested whether correlations existed between any of his measurements and dryness metrics.

“My lab group has done a lot with trying to take leaves and use them to learn as much as we can about the environments, and then we apply this to the fossil record,” Currano says. “We use the size, shape and different morphological characteristics to learn more about climate. We can apply Sam’s results to fossil sites that are 50 million or 60 million years old.”

With WRSP funding, Robertson can be fully immersed in the research group, rather than spread his time among various jobs.

 
“If you’re looking into higher education or STEM jobs, most have preference for students who have research experience that demonstrates those critical thinking skills,” Robertson says. “WRSP offers a big leg up.”

The program’s seminars also taught him how to present and communicate his research to a larger audience. But perhaps the greatest benefit is the one-on-one mentorship Robertson gained. 

“You don’t know what you don’t know, and it helps having someone who’s done research,” he says. “They can tell you a lot of the things that you’re maybe missing — things that are obvious in hindsight, but you wouldn’t know until you’ve walked into them.”

 

Currano adds, “The interactions between undergrads and grad students are super important because it’s been 20 years since I applied to grad school. Sam gets really important mentoring from my grad students.”

After graduation this spring, Robertson plans to study abroad for a year before applying to graduate school.

“Doing research has become something that I’m really interested in for a career,” he says. “I’m definitely going to stay in botany or plant biology.”

 

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