December 9, 2009
By Shelley Stuart
Shoals Marine Lab
Lauren Quevillon.
Lauren Quevillon, a senior Biology major currently “consumed by tests,” vividly remembers the reason she decided to pursue science: Richard Preston’s book The Hot Zone. “I fell in love with science then and there,” she recalled.
During her freshman year at Cornell, Quevillon learned about the Biodiversity & Biology of Marine Invertebrates course taught at the Shoals Marine Laboratory (SML), an affiliate of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. When Quevillon heard that the Shoals Lab offered scholarships, she applied. Receiving a full scholarship was the only way she could take a summer course learning, as she put it, about invertebrates she wasn’t even interested in.
The course turned out to be a second pivotal event to shape Quevillon’s future as a scientist.
During her three weeks on Appledore Island, Quevillon met, and fell in love with, trematodes. The parasitic flatworms have a three-host life cycle, which fascinated Quevillon. Free-swimming trematodes burrow into fish or crabs. Gulls eat an infected animal then shed trematode eggs in their feces. Rain and tides wash the eggs into the water, snails eat the eggs, the eggs hatch, and the cycle repeats. “It really is a game of numbers with parasites,” Quevillon observed.
A very determined Quevillon found a way to spend the next two summers back on Appledore as part of SML’s internship program. She worked with Jeb Byers, an ecologist at the University of Georgia, studying the marine-based Cryptocotyle and Microphallus. They tackled various aspects of trematode life cycles; every time Byers visited the lab, he left Quevillon with new experiments. “It really forced me to be independent and develop my communication skills,” she noted. She now continues aspects of their research on campus with ecology and evolutionary biology professor Drew Harvell.
Once Quevillon survives the late-term onslaught of exams and papers, she will be able to start looking at life after graduation. Trematodes and human parasites will definitely be part of that picture. After carrying up to 18 credits for several semesters, Quevillon plans to spend a year interning with National Institute of Health labs, if accepted into their program. After an internship, she may work towards her doctorate, or possibly an M.D./Ph.D. degree. Quevillon anticipates studying trematodes and infectious parasites, and the intersections between epidemiology and ecology, for a long time to come.
The Myra Shulman Scholarship that proved instrumental to Quevillon’s experience was funded by the generosity of Hank and Nancy Bartels ’48. The scholarship they established “to honor the founders, the pioneers, and the leaders of the Shoals Marine Lab” has greatly influenced the future of a Cornell student. When Quevillon graduates from Cornell, she may have co-authored three scientific publications—including her senior thesis—and she unquestionably found her passion.
All because of a summer course she almost couldn’t take.
Shelley Stuart ’91 is a freelance writer.