Previous Research

Prior to starting graduate school, I worked and did research in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley and in the Sierras Nevada backcountry with then graduate student, Vance Vredenburg.

At the MVZ, I worked as a curatorial assistant as well as on the early stages of development of a bioinformatics project linking ancillary information (e.g. field notebooks, lantern slides, photographs) to specimen information. Since then many of these data at the MVZ have been made publicly available and queryable (see here).

I also conducted two independent projects: the first examined the phylogenetic relationships of Asian salamanders with mitochondrial sequences and used skull and skeletal characters to further explore these relationships (Chan et al. 2001). The second project utilized material collected in field expeditions during the 1960's and 70's to characterize the reproductive cycle of male tropical salamanders that were previously thought to be acyclic (Chan 2003).

 

Top right: Page from Annie Alexander's field notes, an example of the type of material digitized to link with specimen data.
Bottom right: X-rays of members of four genera of Asian salamandrid salamanders.
Bottom left: Histological section of the testis of Bolitoglossa occidentalis with spermatozoa bundles and secondary spermatocytes.

I also spent two summers working for Vance Vredenburg, now at San Francisco State University, on Mountain Yellow-Legged frog conservation. This was relatively early in the recognition of globally widespread amphibian declines and we were examining several potential causes of decline: introduced trout (already well-documented by Vance) and increased UV-B exposure decreasing hatching success and larval survivorship. We removed introduced trout from high elevation lakes to see native frogs return and breed. We also used experimental approaches to examine the effect of UV-B radiation on hatching success and larval behavior in three species of high elevation anurans (Vredenburg et al., in press; Romansic et al., in revision).