January 2022 ABI Student of the Month: Jennifer Price

My name is Jennifer Price and I'm a fourth-year ABI major with a double minor in Medical-Veterinary Entomology and Public Health. I am one of the Undergraduate Co-Chairs for the veterinary side of Knight's Landing One Health Clinic. KLOHC offers free healthcare services through a collaboration between the Knights Landing community and UCD faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students from the medical and veterinary fields. After I graduate, I hope to apply for veterinary school during my gap year. I'm also conducting my practicum research in Attardo Lab on the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which vectors yellow fever virus and dengue virus (among others). My project explores how wildfire ash affects the reproductive and developmental biology of the insect. Since California is one of the few places with Aedes aegypti and frequent wildfires, this question has not been researched extensively. Now that we have discovered that some types of ash increase the attractiveness of their breeding sites and speed up their development, we are performing follow-up experiments with different types of ash and mass spectrometry/chromatography to identify what volatiles are responsible for these effects.

My academic journey as an ABI major has taught me to think critically about the root cause of barriers to healthcare access and reflect on my contributions to veterinary medicine, public health, One Health, and medical-veterinary entomology.  I remain cognizant of the ways these fields may historically rely upon colonialism, classism, and injustice in the name of promoting health. Animal Biology has taught me that the work I conduct does not exist in a vacuum, and I must honor the multidisciplinary collaboration and contemporary contexts that shape my efforts to learn.