Interview with a Graduate Student: Megan Damico as an advocate for Science and the Honey Bee!
For this week’s interview with a graduate student, the Graduate School had the honor of speaking with Megan Damico, a PhD candidate in the UNCG Biology Department. Megan is studying Environmental Health Sciences – focused on understanding the world around us and its consequences on our well-being. In anticipation of her fourth year in the program, Megan and the Graduate School discussed her research, her summer excursion, and what she plans to do in the future!
Introduction
Megan Damico is originally from Livonia, Michigan – a city situated just 15 minutes outside of Detroit! She attended Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan as an undergraduate student where she studied Biomedical Sciences. She is also a first-generation college student who, at first, thought she was going to be a doctor: “As a first-gen student, I thought I needed to become a medical doctor to prove to my family that I could do something great and become successful.”
But the pre-med courses were overwhelming and uninspiring. Thankfully, Megan discovered an exciting and career-changing course in a microbiology lab and lecture. Even though she was an upperclassman at the time, a close mentor helped her re-orient her focus and discover a passion for microbiology research.
“It turned out that instead of working with humans, I was completely fascinated with the microbial organisms that lived in and all around us,” she explained.
She was then encouraged to pursue graduate school, and she was accepted to a summer undergraduate fellowship program at UT Austin when she met Dr. Kasie Raymann – a new UNCG faculty member at the time. The meeting promised an inspiring future in research, and Dr. Raymann invited Megan to join her here at UNCG as part of her lab in the Biology department.
“After visiting UNCG for the first time, I fell in love with Greensboro. It made me feel at home almost immediately and allowed me to tap into community involvement,” she said.
From there, her journey as a graduate student took flight – much like the complex organisms that she studies.
The Honey Bee
During her undergraduate career at Grand Valley State University, Megan was the president of the GVSU Beekeepers, responsible for educating both students and the public about the importance of pollinators like honey bees. This helpful background provided the perfect foundation for her future research interests. It all started with a single question: “Do you think honey bees have bacteria in their gut like we do?”
It turns out that honey bees, just like humans, do have gut bacteria that play a key role in keeping them healthy and active: “Their gut bacteria help them digest their food, activate their immune system, and even fend off pathogens,” Megan explained.
When her question was first proposed, research and information surrounding the topic was fairly novel. But there’s plenty of data to explore because a honey bee’s gut bacteria maintains an important role in better understanding the species.
“I used this passion for bees and microbiology to pursue my summer undergraduate research fellowship in Texas,” Megan said. “I came to graduate school to continue investigating how a honey bee’s lifestyle and genetic background could influence which species and strains of bacteria live inside their gut microbiome.”
Honey Bee Health
Megan also explained that her research has important implications for understanding how a honey bee’s gut bacteria are impacted by environmental and genetic influences. This information can tell us a lot about how these microbes support honey bee health. Especially since honey bees are an important pollinator, and they also act as an important inclusion in their surrounding ecosystem.
For Megan, at this juncture in her research, she’s studying the critical functions of the gut microbiome of honey bees. These bacteria are essential to honey bee well-being, including assisting in breaking down the pollen and nectar that the bees forage and defending the bees from pathogens by activating their immune system.
“My work is trying to understand how a honey bee’s lifestyle and their genetic background could influence [different] types of bacterial strains,” she explained.
Unfortunately, honey bee populations have started to decline in recent years, and this is due to a variety of factors including habitat loss, an overuse of agricultural chemicals, the rise of hive pests, and an increase in viral and bacterial diseases. Considering the importance of honey bees as pollinators, especially in our agricultural industries, Megan’s research could be the key to changing the outlook of their future.
Advocating for Science
Entering her fourth year of graduate school, Megan is occupied with completing her remaining projects so that she can start writing her thesis in time for her final year at UNCG. There are several questions that she’s trying to answer when it comes to the final dissertation:
- How does a honey bee’s lifestyle and genetic background influence the bacterial composition inside the gut microbiome?
- Do honey bee gut bacterial strains have the same functions or are they different? Can these bacteria do more than one thing for the honey bee or are they evolving to do more or less?
- How do marketed prebiotics and probiotics affect the honey bee gut microbiome if at all?
But there’s still so much to learn in order to answer her questions, including how these gut bacteria are influenced by a honey bee’s lifestyle. This can include anything from a honey bee’s diet, their age, their role within the larger colony, and their genetic background: “By understanding these key pieces of information, we can better help bees recover from disease by creating specific bacterial cocktails that suit their needs!”
Summer Plans
Recently, Megan also took a cross-country road trip over the past summer. She and her partner, a recent UNCG PhD graduate, drove all the way from Texas back to North Carolina. She describes herself and her partner as outdoor enthusiasts, and they visited several national forests, including the longleaf pine forests in the mountains of Alabama.
Megan also calls herself an avid birder, and during her summer travels, she was often on the lookout for new bird species.
She and her partner finished their excursion in the Congaree National Park in SC: “It is the last low-land hardwood forest in the United States – think GIANT pine trees and 100% humidity…If you haven’t been, definitely get down there!”
The Future and Beyond
Finally, the Graduate School asked Megan about her future long-term goals. Interestingly, she plans to pursue a career in science policy and advocacy, and she hopes to educate and push for a more active inclusion of science in the policies that lawmakers debate.
“Even though I love research, I want science to extend far beyond scientists exclusively…to [encourage] lawmakers to listen to the research that’s so important for our future!” she said.
It seems that community involvement is very important to Megan, and she wants to help the members of her community and leave behind a lasting impact. Of course, her advocacy efforts are already happening right here in the Greensboro community! Megan’s work includes cleaning local parks and assisting with student hunger initiatives that have only become more important during the pandemic.
She also hopes that her continued efforts will inspire other students to become active in their communities: “I am a student group leader at UNCG, and [I] am civically engaged in North Carolina politics. It’s given me the confidence to help lift more student voices to enact positive change in our community,” she said.
She also wants to encourage more graduate students to find unique opportunities and become involved with an organization that they love: “There is a group for everything in Greensboro and becoming involved in my community made me feel more confident in my own work,” she explained.
Ultimately, Megan wants to create a better future, for both small and large organisms alike, and she wants to inspire others to do the same: “I hope to show students ways they can use their voice to cultivate a brighter future.”
For more stories like this one, check out the rest of the Graduate School website!
