Meelyn M Pandit
Grindstaff Lab
Oklahoma State University
About me
Hello! I hail from Indiana, where I received my Bachelor's in Science from Indiana University Bloomington. While I was at IU, I conducted research in the Ketterson Lab as a Cox Research Scholar. Specifically, my research focused on the persistance of post-colonization divergence of song phenology and output between two populations of dark-eyed juncos in California. My senior thesis focused on the relationship between social and vocal complexity across multiple avian families. I also had the opportunity to conduct a field project at Mountain Lake Biological Station, in which I conducted a project on junco long-range song honestly communicating immunological state to conspecifics. Through my experiences in the Ketterson Lab, I gained a passion for behavioral ecology.
To learn more about the Ketterson Lab, click here!
After my experiences in South Africa, I was accepted to an internship in the Combes Lab at Harvard University during the summer of 2012, in which I filmed predator-prey interactions between multiple species of dragonflies pursuing multiple species of prey with high speed cameras, to determine whether dragonfly size and prey type influence capture success. I helped film dragonfly interactions with prey using three high-speed cameras and then analyzed dragonfly flight behavior in MATLAB by recording the location of the dragonfly in each second of the video. I presented the results of this project at the 2013 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology conference in San Francisco. The results were included in a manuscript, in which I was an author, and published in Integrative and Comparative Biology. This project exposed me to new ideas about how biomechanics can influence the behavior and survival of an organism, and also gave me a better understanding of some of the differences in conducting research on vertebrates versus invertebrates.
During my junior year at IU, I had the opportunity to study abroad in Cape Town, South Africa, where I conducted paleobiology research in the Chinsamy-Turan lab at the University of Cape Town. Here I conducted a study on the bone morphometrics and histology of the Ludwig’s bustard, an endangered bird endemic to the Karoo desert. These birds have a high collision rate with low-level power lines, and I examined if bustard age and sex could be determined by analyzing bone morphometrics and bone histology from the bustard remains. These measurements were used to determine if the bustard population structure was changing due to power line collisions. I presented the preliminary results of this project at the Society of Avian Paleontology and Evolution conference in Vienna, Austria.
To learn more about the Chinsamy-Turan Lab, click here!
Before I became a graduate student at OSU, I worked as a field technician in the Dickinson Lab at the Hastings Natural History Reservation in Carmel Valley, California. Here, I assisted on a long-term project on a population of western bluebirds (Sialia mexicana). I conducted weekly nestbox checks, monitored egg and nestling development, conducted nestwatches, and recorded the dawn chorus of male western bluebirds. It was through this projecct that I became interested in bluebird vocalizations