Roving Band of Bachelors Leave their Home Troop
Just like adolescent macaques, graduating college students leave the relative familiarity of the university they’ve known for the past four years, and journey out to share their knowledge with new homes as they continue to strive towards their career goals.
Undergraduates in the Gothard Lab spend many years working closely with the monkeys to gain their trust and complete the experimental tasks that further our research. Our current cohort of graduates have contributed to projects that studied adolescent behavior on a delay discounting task, the brain’s response to grooming compared to nonsocial touch, how adolescent monkey’s developed prosocially, how interoceptive signals affected choice behaviors in approach-avoidance tasks, how monkeys looked at social interactions, and assisted in the development of stimuli and analysis for multiple tasks.
The Gothard lab has a significantly large band of Bachelor(‘s of Science) leaving the nest in 2025: two students pursuing their PhDs, and three proceeding to veterinary studies. These students dedicated their time, their summers, and even their weekends to the work and have come out the other side ready to meet their future goals.
Where are they off to?
Gabriella Ames, B.S. in Veterinary Sciences - Oregon State University
Olivia Baumann, B.S. in Veterinary Sciences + Minor in Biochemistry - Washington State University
Alijah Howard, B.S. in Veterinary Sciences + Minor in Spanish - Pima Community College
Ryan Le, B.S. in Physiology - University of Chicago
Gabriel Neal, B.S. in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science - University of Pittsburgh
We would also like to extend a special thank you and solemn farewell to our Lab Manager, Derek O’Neill, who has decided to take a break from science after over 20 years in the field of animal research. He has made an indelible impression on the Gothard lab in the past 6 years, and will be missed by all primates, human and nonhuman alike. We wish him luck on all future ventures.
