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I grew up in North Haven, Connecticut, a town just north of New Haven. In my free time I like to swim and play tennis. I also enjoy taking pictures of both living and nonliving things. After graduating from North Haven high school, I went to college at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts where I majored in biology. I graduated in the spring of 2004 with a B.S. in biology and a minor in secondary education.
Sara Espowood
Graduate Program: M.S. in Biology
Field of Study: Not Available
Academic Background: Not Available
Email Address: Not Available
I enjoy studying genetics and evolution because
I like solving puzzles. I am also fascinated by all the order and organization
that exists even though on the surface life seems so chaotic. I became
interested in science in high school when I first learned about how the
many different elements on the planet all have a similar structure. This
structure was the microscopic world of the atom. Science was interesting
to me in high school, but I didn’t decide that I wanted to study
science until I got to college. I took many different classes in college
and decided that biology intrigued me the most.
Currently, I am studying for a master’s degree in biology at UMass Boston. I am working on my master’s thesis in Dr. Rick Kesseli’s laboratory where we study plant genomics. We are studying and characterizing species within the Compositae (Asteraceae) family of flowering plants. There are more than 20,000 species within the Compositae family, some of which are economically important crop species, invasive species, ornamental species, and species which produce a great amount of plant oil. Specifically, I am working with two species within this plant family: lettuce and sunflower. My thesis project involves investigating three groups of genes present in lettuce and sunflower. We are comparing the location of each of these genes on both the lettuce and sunflower genomes to see if these genes have remained in the same order since these two species began evolving separate from each other. When genes have remained in the same order throughout evolution, this is known as synteny.