Karen O'Connell

PhD student
University Program in Genetics and Genomics
Duke University
E-mail: karen.oconnell@duke.edu

B.A., Truman State University, 2009

Outreach

A crucial part of my role as a research scientist is sharing my little piece of expertise with the public. I strive to incorporate public outreach into my education and research, mainly through designing and implementing activities for local elementary and high school students. I have designed modules for a "Science Day" at Hillandale Elementary School for 3rd grade students during March. The modules strive to demonstrate properties of natural selection while highlighting the role genetics has to play in evolution. Along those same lines, I am involved in outreach at Riverside High School. With the help of Mika Hunter, a local biology teacher, we have created and organized a field trip for the Advanced Placement biology classes. The goal of the field trip is to introduce the soon-to-be college student what research scientists do and the types of questions these scientists ask.

Previous Research

My previous graduate work in the Noor lab involved probing raw genomic DNA for potential bacterial and fungal endosymbionts of Drosophila miranda, Drosophila pseudoobscura pseudoobscura, Drosphila pseudoobscura bogotana, Drosophila persimilis, and Drosophila lowei. I was interested in the possibility that these bacterial sequences found in genomic DNA have an effect on the flies' genome assemblies. Over the course of the project, I constructed a BLAST pipeline in Perl and used an online toolkit called Galaxy to help me characterize potential endosymbionts of lab-reared and wild-caught flies using raw traces of genomic DNA. The results are summarized in the publication below and were presented in Portland, OR, at the Society for the Study of Evolution's annual meeting in 2010.

My previous undergraduate research in population genetics leveraged synonymous and non-synonymous polymorphisms to simultaneously quantify the effects of natural selection and genetic drift on populations.

Publications

O'Connell, K. E., and M. A. F. Noor. 2010. Raw whole Drosophila genomes sequence traces have contaminant sequences from bacterial symbionts. Drosophila Information Service, 93: 127-131. paper