“Do you know where her flies are?” asks her lab assistant over the phone.
It might seem like an odd line of inquiry, but it’s all in a day’s work for Parker, the E. Desmond Lee Endowed Professor in Zoological Studies and chair of the at the . For the past decade she has been leading research in the Galapagos Islands on plasmodium, the parasite that causes malaria.
Hours before, Mari Cruz Jaramillo, a gradate student in biology at UMSL and a native of Ecuador, returned to St. Louis weighed down with bird blood and mosquito samples. She was part of a six-member, all-female team that spent two months conducting research in the Galapagos Islands. Four of the researchers are current UMSL students and one is an alumna who works at the .
Reviewed 2013-12-11