Aggie women in entomology host dr. sarah sander lower as an invited speaker on October 19th 2017.

Dr. Sarah Sander Lower was this semesters Aggie Women in Entomology invited guest speaker. Sarah has had an extraordinary early career. She began, working on her undergraduate degree at Amherst College, she then completed her PhD at the University of Georgia under Dr. David Hall focusing on the evolution of firefly visual pigments. Here she was awarded the prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.  She was also awarded the University of Georgia Interdisciplinary LIfe Sciences Assistantship, which brought 5 years of research funding. In 2013 was awarded the NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant and as a result of this research.

Since finishing her PhD, she has been working at Cornell University as a postdoctoral researcher in the labs of Andy Clark and Dan Barbash, leaders in studies of repetitive DNA and evolutionary genetics.  While working on repetitive DNA in Drosophila species at Cornell, she has continued to work with fireflies, being a project co-leader in the Firefly Genome Project and working on the Photinus pyralis Demography and Selection Project.

She has since been awarded the first ever James F. Crow Early Career Researcher award from the Genetics Society of America as well as the Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Individual National Research Service Award

In her short career, she has been an author on seven peer reviewed articles as well as giving near 20 presentations, 6 of which were invited talks. She has recently collaborated with our department on papers with Dr. Spencer Johnston and Dr. Carl Hjelmen.
Thank you Sarah for the inspiration and the fireflies, it was a pleasure to host you!

.Photo (from left to right): Dr. Estelle Martin, Alex Payne, Dr. Sarah Sander Lower, Jocelyn Holt, Chloe Hawkings and Leah Buchman.