Mary Hart
Ph.D. Student
Student’s Passion Takes Her to Panama
By Jennifer T. Allen
Mary Hart’s passion lies in working with fish in a marine environment. That passion and two UK College of Arts and Sciences professors brought Mary from Gainesville, FL to Lexington.
The research of Philip Crowley and Craig Sargent, two professors in UK’s Biology Department, ties directly into Hart’s interest. Hart’s dissertation research investigates ecological factors that lead to variation in mating strategy in a small coral reef fish, Serranus tortugarum or Chalk Bass. Crowley, Sargent and Hart, a biology doctorate candidate, collaborate by combining theory and empirical research to understand how the environment can affect mating systems.
“It was a good match, because they have the theoretical expertise, and I had experience doing empirical studies and had an interest in doing this project,” Hart said.
Hart’s classroom is currently the water off of Panama’s Caribbean coast at the Bocas Research Station, part of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Having been awarded a Smithsonian Institute (SI) Fellowship for 2007-08, Hart will finish a year and a half research stint in Panama this summer. The SI fellowship provides a stipend for one year of dissertation field research in Panama. Prior to this, Hart was awarded UK Graduate School’s Presidential Fellowship for 2006-07 which allowed her to spend her time in Panama continuing research she started in the summer of 2004.
“It has been wonderful to work on my own with this project in another country,” Hart said. “I’ve also had the opportunity to work with undergraduate students from the United States (seven from the University of Kentucky) as well as Holland, Venezuela and Panama. It has been a nice cultural experience.”
As a mentor, Hart works with interns or independent study candidates in the lab where they examine and dissect fish to determine sex allocation patterns. In the future, Hart would like to dive deeper into why mating systems vary and what sort of environmental factors are influencing the differences. She would also like to expand her research to include other species.
“It’s been a great challenge to be out in the field, developing experiments and proposals on my own and making it work,” she said. “It can be difficult at times but I’m making progress and it’s going well.”