GOING VIRAL
16 Hollins
Sharon Meador
W
hen biology major Ciera Morris ’19 wanted to challenge herself by completing a voluntary senior thesis, she sought a project that would reflect her interest in infectious disease research as it relates to public health. Collaborating with biology professors Elizabeth Gleim ’06 and Morgan Wilson, she found the perfect vehicle: exploring tick ecology in Southwest Virginia and its possible connection to the risk of Lyme disease. “Given there are a lot of public health implications in regard to tick research, working with Dr. Gleim and Dr. Wilson was the best option for me,” Morris says. “We decided my project should focus on species composition and the abundance and phenology of ticks in Southwest Virginia to better comprehend disease ecology in the Roanoke Valley. This included understanding what tick species are present and what times of the year they are active.” “Her project has been incredibly intensive, involving a year of monthly field collections of ticks at sites all over the Roanoke Valley,” Gleim explains. “She collected almost 20,000 ticks and did a lot of lab work, too.” Morris’s research, along with a Signature Internship with the nonprofit organization Climate Central, earned her a two-year post-baccalaureate fellowship at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana. The facility is part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of the National Institutes of Health, where she’ll “be looking at how pathogens are transmitted to hosts, and how disease development occurs out of that. I’m excited because I think it’s going to be a good transition from dealing with tick ecology to viral research in general.” After completing her fellowship, Morris expects to go on to graduate school and pursue either a master’s degree or a Ph.D., focusing on infectious disease.
THINKING M
eaghan Harrington ’19 once
believed her inability to focus on one interest or a single area of study reflected poorly upon her. “In a lot of places, there’s really no space to be indecisive,” she says. “It’s viewed as a negative thing.” But at Hollins, Harrington could immerse herself in an environment that encourages exploration and selfdiscovery. “Meaghan is what I’d describe as a ‘big thinker,’” says Associate Professor of History Rachel Nuñez. “She really exemplifies the power of a liberal arts education to help students find new ways of thinking and being.” Ultimately, Harrington double majored in history and classical studies, but she continued to embrace topics she found compelling. For example, a class in dance helped inform her choice to write her senior history thesis about the rhetoric of Mormon women on the female body in the late 19th century. Interested in archaeology since grade school, Harrington spent six weeks in the summer of 2017 doing hands-on fieldwork at the annual Archaeological Field School in Jamestown, Virginia, site of the first permanent English settlement in North America. Field excavation drew Harrington back to Jamestown last summer for an internship designed to help “demystify archaeology.” She helped conduct research on the Angela Project, an effort to explore the life and landscape of one of the first recorded Africans brought to English North America in slavery. “I’m excited to contribute to the creation of more diverse stories about the past,” Harrington says. She used Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to collect data at the site. “With this software-based technology, you can create maps and three-