LAB RAT OF THE WEEK: Grace K. Charles ’11

While some students spend their summers researching alone in dimly lit and poorly ventilated labs, Grace K. Charles ’11 spent the summer before her senior year conducting research in the company of elephants and hyenas underneath the bright Kenyan sun.

“It was like one huge funny adventure,” said Charles, adding that she would sometimes exit her home to see wild animals in front of door.

Charles, an organismic and evolutionary biology concentrator, is now working on her senior thesis using the data she collected over last summer.

“Just getting to do your own research is really an experience unto itself,” Charles said. “It’s something you can’t really get if you’re just taking classes.”

Charles can trace her interest in science back to the school yard, where she remembers writing in her fifth grade yearbook, “I’m going to be a scientist someday,” she says. “It’s been a lifelong dream.”

In high school, Charles worked in an engineering lab. The summer after her freshman year, she studied abroad at Oxford, where, she said, her interest in animal behavior sparked. Pursuing her newfound passion, Charles spent her sophomore summer in Puerto Rico, studying the way species adapt to their environments.

But her path to the plains of Kenya was unexpected.

During her second year in college, Charles began research work with Jonathan B. Losos ’84, a professor of organismic and evolutionary biology. The following year, researching the evolutionary purpose of Anole lizards’ tail crests in the same lab, ecologist and Harvard Junior Fellow Robert M. Pringle arrived from Kenya to give a presentation to Charles’ lab group.

She says she found Pringle’s research studying the effects of climate change on ecosystems “really cool.”

She then made the decision to spend the summer before senior year with Pringle in Kenya, doing her own thesis research on how herbivores, as well as different climatic factors, affect the ecosystem.

It was in Africa where Charles says she realized that she was more interested in the ecosystem than the animals within it. The summer in Kenya was also Charles’ first time controlling her own experiment.

“I actually got to run and make all the decisions,” Charles said. “So it was a great learning experience. I didn’t come in being an expert or anything but I definitely know a lot more now.”

Charles is still working on her thesis, currently analyzing satellite images of the regions in which she conducted research. Before applying to graduate school, Charles said she plans to return to Africa to manage her project.

“She’s the sort of undergraduate student everyone wants to have,” Losos said. “She’s hardworking, enthusiastic, very creative, intelligent, and—just as importantly—she gets the job done.”

—Staff writer Melanie A. Guzman can be reached at melanieguzman@college.harvard.edu.