Hailey Cray ’20 made profound connections with several different communities at the University of Vermont during her academic career, including the biology and women’s and gender studies departments, UVM’s Graduate School, and the Larner College of Medicine. She graduates this May with a B.A. in biology and is already halfway towards earning her master’s in public health at UVM. Now she’s preparing to begin a new job as a clinical research assistant at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass.

Cray, a native of Ferrisburgh, Vt., initially had her sights set on a traditional medical school path. Today, she jokingly calls herself a “reformed pre-med student.”

“When I first started at UVM I was pretty set on not going into research because I wanted to work with people,” she recalls. “It hadn’t occurred to me at the time that there’s a lot of research that focuses on people and their experiences.”

Cray found a home in the gender, sexuality and women studies program, a discipline at UVM that draws from social sciences, physical sciences, and humanities perspectives. “The program was a way to explore the challenges faced by women and other marginalized populations,” she said. “It’s a really close community of students and professors.”

Her interest in science and women’s studies came together through her Honors College thesis with co-investigator and advisor, Dr. Marjorie C. Meyer, who is affiliated with the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department at the UVM Medical Center. (Cray notes that her connection with Meyer goes back to the very beginning—Meyer was the obstetrician who delivered Cray at Fletcher Allen Hospital).

Cray’s project examines retention rates in medication-assisted therapy centers of Vermont among women who have an opioid use disorder and are pregnant, or are parenting young children. She finds that young mothers with a history of Opioid use are often unable to continue treatment.

“These women face so many challenges through a lack of reliable housing, medical insurance and transportation. These problems can snowball, so we hope to find ways to improve retention in this particularly vulnerable population,” she notes.

At McLean Hospital, her research will focus on a challenge many older patients contend with—Alzheimer’s disease. Cray is intrigued by promising drug trials the hospital is conducting.

“The drug trials are pretty cool. They are experimenting with technology that patients and caregivers can both use to help monitor behaviors in patients with mild cognitive deficits.”

Raymond Looney’s summer break began with a trip to Townsville, Australia, to attend the 5th International Symposium on Ranaviruses, a genus of viruses that are infectious to amphibians and reptiles. The experts he met at the three-day symposium gave him valuable feedback on his summer research project, which investigates whether the Canada Goose might be a vector for the spread of ranaviruses in the northeast.

“I’d never been outside the U.S., so it was awesome to visit another country and talk with experts from around the world about my research interests,” he said. Another awesome thing about the trip: his travel was paid for in part by the UVM Suiter grant and an NSF funded travel grant. Likewise, Looney’s summer research project is supported by a Simon Family Public Research Fellowship. “I’m really grateful for the support,” Looney said. “The fellowship allows me to live in Burlington this summer and pay for living and research expenses.”

He discovered his academic path at UVM when he took Ecology and Evolution, a course taught by biology professor Nicholas Gotelli who is advising Looney’s project.

This summer, Looney is travelling to sites all around Vermont with researchers from the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department who are banding Canadian Geese found on freshwater lakes and ponds. Before releasing the birds, Looney swabs them for signs of viruses.

Ranavirus is believed to have caused several recent mortality events in amphibian populations. Looney is interested in building an outreach program through the Fish and Wildlife Department educating boat owners and researchers about ways to minimize spread, like cleaning their boats and gear.

Looney says no current research points to birds as carriers, but waterfowl, because of their proximity to fish, amphibian, and reptile populations, could be a vector. He notes that ranavirus is found in the water and has the ability to be picked up by the feathers.

“The virus can survive anywhere its moist and warm,” he said. “The oil glands birds have near the base of their tails may help preserve the virus.”

When the banding season is over, Looney will spend his time in the lab analyzing samples. He sees this as a long-term project—he’s been accepted into the UVM accelerated masters in biology program which will allow him to earn a graduate degree one year after receiving his B.S. His current research will serve as the foundation of his graduate thesis.

"Everyone has a unique event that they can recall that got them interested in research. Maybe it is a particular professor, course, or lab experience, but for me it’s a bit more personal than that. When I was younger, my mom was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. In order to understand what that truly meant, I searched around for any literature I could find about the disease, figuring that if I could learn about the disease then it might seem less intimidating. What I didn’t expect out of the whole process, however, was to find a true interest in research. It just so happened that right around this time I also got my first taste of the true experimental process through my high school biology class and it all snowballed from there. Needless to say, I came to UVM with the intention of joining a research lab, and as a result have had the privilege of working in the Mawe Lab on a Multiple Sclerosis related project for the past three years.

Currently I am working on my honors thesis in the lab examining the effects of mucosal serotonin (5-HT) signaling in Experimental Autoimmune Encephalomyelitis (EAE), the mouse model of Multiple Sclerosis. 5-HT is a neurotransmitter that initiates, regulates, and modifies GI motility, secretion, and vasodilation and has been noted to be altered in inflammatory diseases. Although Multiple Sclerosis is classified as an inflammatory disease, the implications of 5-HT signaling have yet to be examined. That said, it is the aim of this work to test the hypothesis that there will be an increase in 5-HT expression in the EAE GI tract driven by a decrease in the 5-HT transporter SERT. Additionally, my project has recently adapted an additional component of examining the possibility that female mice respond to EAE in a similar manner to male mice in terms of GI dysmotility symptoms, as male mice have up until this point been the commonly used model in the lab. This exploration is based off of a recent finding in the lab that showed asymptomatic male mice can still present with GI dysfunction, leading to the hypothesis that female mice, which generally present asymptomatic, might also develop GI dysmotility and therefore could serve as equal models to their male counterparts. Once this work is complete and I have graduated in the spring, it is my plan to continue straight into graduate school in order to obtain a Ph.D. in neuroscience with the ultimate career goal of pursuing research full time."