Honors College Fellow Wins Internship at Chicago's Field Museum

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Honors biology major Wilson Guillory has won a summer internship at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

Wilson Guillory, an Honors College Fellow and biology major in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, has won a coveted position as a summer intern at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. He has just completed his first year at the U of A, and was one of only eight students nationwide selected for the highly competitive internship, which is a Research Experience for Undergraduates funded by the National Science Foundation. He will spend 10 weeks this summer working under Petra Sierwald, curator of Arachnida and Myriapoda – spiders and millipedes.

“Basically, I’ll be looking at millipedes very closely under a microscope and dissecting them to generate data,” Guillory said. “I’ll be helping to make a kind of field guide, so the millipedes can be identified and future researchers can use that data to identify and place millipedes in context of their relatives, to see how they are related.”

Although Guillory has been on campus for just one year, he has already gotten involved in hands-on research in evolutionary biology. His adviser, Jeanne McLachlin, associate director of the Liebolt Premedical Program, introduced him to Andrew Alverson, assistant professor of biological sciences, who asked Guillory to join his lab.

“Dr. Alverson studies diatoms,” Guillory said. “Right now, I’m being trained in the lab, but I plan on doing my honors thesis with him eventually.”

Encouraged by McLachlin, Guillory applied to five different Research Experience for Undergraduate programs, and he was accepted to both Chicago and North Carolina.

“I was pretty lucky to get into two out of the five programs I applied to,” Guillory said. “The program at the Field Museum accepted eight out of 400 applicants for the internship, so I feel really privileged.”