Emma Gerit is a biology major with an emphasis in molecular and cell biology graduating in Fall 2022. She moved from San Diego to Merced in 2018 to begin her academic journey at UC Merced. Her freshman year she joined the Aristotle House Living Learning Community where she was selected as the student ambassador for her class. In this role she was given the opportunity to collaborate with faculty and administration in further developing and promoting the program while completing a community service project at Lake Yosemite. After discovering she had an interest in research, she became a summer intern at The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego and worked in the Nemazee Lab which studies immunology. The work she did at Scripps has been included in a manuscript submitted for publication. In the Fall of 2021 she studied abroad in Costa Rica as part of UCEAP’s Tropical Biology and Conservation program. In Costa Rica she developed an interest in ecology and evolution and completed a research project involving pollen loads on nectar feeding bats. When Emma returned to Merced in Fall 2022 she joined the Materna Lab which studies transcriptional regulation of early endoderm development in zebrafish. In the Materna Lab she worked on a project dissecting the function of the gene syne1b and mentored other undergraduate students through a semester-long project where they each used CRISPR to knock out a gene in zebrafish embryos involved in endoderm development. Looking to the future, Emma has applied to Ph.D. programs and hopes to continue pursuing research in evolutionary developmental biology.
