Overseas Trip Strengthens Undergraduates Interest in Biology

UC Riversides Unique Baares and Azeem Rahman spent eight weeks researching fish in Brazil

By Iqbal Pittalwala on November 14, 2014

UC Riverside undergraduates Azeem Rahman (left) and Unique Baares spent eight weeks last summer doing evolutionary biology research in Brazil.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. Undergraduate UniqueBaares at the University of California, Riverside never predicted that one day she would be doing evolutionary biology research, let alone field work in faraway, exotic Brazil. Four years ago, she was working in the UC Riverside Child Development Center, where, coincidentally, the daughter of David Reznick, a distinguished professor of biology, was a student.

On a field trip one day, she told me, My daddy works with fish here at UCR. This sparked my interest immediately and I thought this would be a great opportunity for research experience, said Baares, now a senior biology major and a pre-medical student. I emailed Dr. Reznick right away about my interest in working in his lab, and he gladly took me in as an intern.

Little didBaares know then that she would eventually spend weeks in Brazil, which she did last summer researching Phalloceros fish distinguishing between different species and examining placenta.

Phalloceros was thought to be just one species but now we are finding multiple subspecies of the fish, she said. Our goal is to classify each, via examination of traits and molecular data.

She was joined in Brazil by fellow-undergraduate Azeem Rahman, a third-year biology major who is minoring in anthropology. Rahman, unlikeBaares and most other biology majors at UCR, is planning a career in a biological field instead of medical school.

We left for Rio de Janeiro in mid-July and returned mid-September, he said. We worked on quite a range of projects in Brazil, helping other graduate students there as well as working on our own project. This included traveling to a sparsely inhabited jungle island to take part in research on nutrient uptake of rivers and streams. Our own project included analyzing closely related guppy species by catching and dissecting them to find their life histories. We did not know what we would find, as we did not know the extent of the fish species relationships.

Rahman andBaares worked at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ for Universidad do Estado do Rio de Janeiro) in an ecology lab run by Eugenia Zandon, a biologist who has worked on several projects with Reznick. Reznick and Zandon have an exchange program that facilitates students from Brazil coming to UCR to do research, and vice versa. The research project, called Placenta and life-history traits: evolution in the fish genus Phalloceros, is being done in association with the International Research Experience for Undergraduates, and is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and CAPES, the Brazilian equivalent of NSF.

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Overseas Trip Strengthens Undergraduates Interest in Biology