Division III is remarkable. The student-athletes who attend and compete at DIII colleges do so without monetary compensation and often in conjunction with rigorous academic schedules and a good deal of extracurricular activities thrown in as well. Over the course of my own collegiate career, I shared pool space with athletes who developed robots, helped with political campaigns or competed in foreign countries. It is these stories and these athletes who best exemplify what it means to be a student-athlete at the Division III level.
What follows is a tribute to the athletes of Division III, showcasing seniors from across the country who have brought their own passion to swimming and academia. This series of articles strives to capture some of the many incredible, interesting or quirky things our swimming and diving seniors have done while out in the wider world.
All hail Division III.
Stop the Bloodsuckers
Kenyon College Senior Jacque Garcia (Image courtesy of Kenyon Athletics)
Kenyon College senior Jacque Garcia spent this past summer working tirelessly to rid us of what might possibly be labeled the world’s peskiest insect: the mosquito.
Garcia’s work at The Ohio State University’s agricultural campus focused on the tiny bloodsuckers that are commonly associated with health problems such as malaria and dengue fever. “We’re trying to stop [the] production of the proteins that help the [mosquitoes] urinate,” she said.
Why?
Well, the logic is pretty simple: post-dining, a mosquito needs to rid itself of excess water and salt to be able to fly. If their bloated bodies are incapable of taking off, they will have shorter life spans, thereby reducing their abilities to spread diseases from host to host.
“A lot of pesticides scientists used previously just attacked the mosquitoes’ nervous systems,” Garcia explained. “When you use something like that, they can adapt to it really quickly.”
Because mosquitoes are pretty tiny creatures to study, a day in the life of a mosquito protein researcher is necessarily microscopic. It starts with the breeding of the mosquitoes for research. “We grew them,” Garcia recounted, “from eggs, to larvae, to pupae, to mosquitoes.”
The fully grown research animals are kept in specialized cages to prevent them from eating blood. “If they drink blood, they’re supposed to die,” Garcia pointed out. Instead, the mosquitoes received sugar water rations. “Theoretically, they could be like butterflies and just go for flowers,” she mused. Wouldn’t that be a world?
In order to test the effectiveness of the protein changes, injections must be made to a host of mosquitoes, but first you have to catch them. “You use basically like a kid’s bug-catcher, air-gun and so it’s this suction thing,” she said. “You attach it to a funnel that sucks in air, then you stick it in the cage and you catch your mosquitoes.” From there, the mosquitoes go on ice to temporarily stun them, until the researcher is ready to attempt the next step.
“When you’re ready to do something with them, you have to take them off the ice,” Garcia said. “Then you put them under the microscope where you’re going to work with them. And there’s maybe ten seconds to do what you’re going to do before they wake back up.” Talk about a tiny window of opportunity!
“I got pretty good at injecting them in the right spot,” Garcia said. “Probably took two or three before I could find the right spot.” The next step is survival rate. “Say I injected thirty mosquitoes – probably about half of them lived.” Part of the challenge is the size of the instruments. “Everything is so tiny; we do everything under the microscope,” Garcia said. “You kill so many more than you inject,” she added.
Garcia’s work is part of her interest in public health, but this isn’t the first time she has done hands-on style research over the summer. The summer before this one, she stayed on campus at Kenyon to study moth caterpillars. “I was trying to figure out what kind of bacteria was in [the caterpillars’’] stomachs,” Garcia said. “I was dissecting a lot of them and getting bacterial DNA out of their stomachs.”
The research – while in the animal physiology lab – has information pertinent to humans as well. “It’s also related to health,” Garcia pointed out. Nation-wide epidemics of obesity and diabetes could be linked to the “bacterial atmosphere” of human stomachs. “[This knowledge is] crucial to controlling that,” she said.
It’s Not (Quite) Rocket Science
Smith College Senior Alyssa Pascuzzo (Image courtesy of Smith Athletics)
Smith College senior Alyssa Pascuzzo has loved space since she was little. So it comes as no surprise that the little girl who enjoyed watching meteor showers at four in the morning with hot cocoa would grow into the young woman who interned at NASA.
“My dad was an amateur astronomer,” Pascuzzo said. “I was the only science-y daughter when I was young. […] We’d watch Discovery channel together. Shows about the universe on the science channel.” As such, Pascuzzo said she had always known she loved science and space, but until she discovered geology, she hadn’t realized what she could do with it.
That’s where this past summer and her internship comes in. Pascuzzo said she had happened upon the internship with NASA almost by accident during an online search. Another student from Smith had done an internship there the summer before, focusing on astrophysics. Pascuzzo’s interest was planetary geology. She submitted, and waited, not sure whether she would be accepted.
“There [are] twelve spots, and eight hundred applicants,” Pascuzzo said. “These eight hundred applicants come from all over the world. We had five interns from outside the US: two were from the UK, one from Canada, one from Slovakia.” But Pascuzzo did get accepted, and spent ten weeks looking at craters on Mars.
Now, one might wonder, what could even the most passionate space-lover spend ten weeks studying about craters?
It’s the mountains inside them that holds Pascuzzo’s interest. “Craters that are 100 kilometers will form a central peak,” Pascuzzo explained. “Kind of like when you drop a droplet of water into a pond, and it goes in and it splashes back up? Well, picture that in rock, but the rock solidifies as a peak.”
Those peaks are made up mostly of sedimentary rock, where geological records of the planet can be found, similar to how geologists on earth learn about our own planet’s history. “These mountains record paleo-climates and paleo-environments,” Pascuzzo said. Some scientists focus on the chemical analyses; Pascuzzo’s interest was the physical appearance. “What I was doing was looking at the geomorphic features, that have been eroded and deposited by wind and/or water,” she explained.
Her primary crater of interest was named Gale. At 155 kilometers in diameter, Gale is what one might call an “average” sized crater. It certainly isn’t up to the standards of the largest known crater on Mars (400 kilometers in diameter).
“By looking at the geomorphic features in each crater, it’s used to help interpret exactly how Mars evolved from a wet planet to a dry planet,” Pascuzzo said. And part of analyzing the features is comparing and contrasting them to other craters of similar size and placement on the planet.
While staring at (huge) bumps on a planet’s surface for weeks on end might not be everyone’s cup of tea, it certainly is Pascuzzo’s. After spending the greater portion of her summer comparing Gale to six other craters, she’s now spending the greater part of her senior year writing about Nicholson crater: “The crater I found to be most similar to Gale crater,” in Pascuzzo’s own words.
She won’t be done with space after graduating either. “I plan to apply to planetary science or planetary geology graduate program and pursue my PhD, most likely working with Mars again. […] I have big question on my mind about Mars that we haven’t solved yet,” Pascuzzo said.
I’m really just waiting to find out if aliens do exist.