Duke University | Howard Hughes Undergraduate Program

Hi, my name is Dani Vasco and I am a rising senior at Riverside High School in Durham. I am also a rising scientist in the Di Giulio toxicology lab.

To tell a little about myself, I am originally from Ecuador, a small rainforest-y country on the West Coast of South America. My parents took me to the U.S. when I was three, but I still feel quite connected to Ecuador because of the large extended family I have there. One of the more interesting things about my situation is that my father was a jungle tour guide while he lived in Ecuador. His recounting of jungle and Amazon River experiences got me interested in biology and tropical studies; who wouldn’t be after hearing stories about leopards, bullet ants, and tapirs?

After hearing these tantalizing rainforest accounts for a decade, I decided to join my Dad on a trip back to Ecuador over the summer of 2006. In addition to the family visits, I spent four full days along the Napo and Shiripuno Rivers (tributaries of the Amazon River), and romped around in the rainforest for the first time. Although I saw no jaguars, I later appreciated how cool and groundbreaking someday working in the rainforest could be, as so much of it remains unstudied. (I say “later” because at the time of the trip, I was in the ninth grade and would have been best described as an indifferent little chap).

The next summer, after getting my priorities straightened out, I found myself in the rainforest once again while participating in a two-week tropical biology program. The program took place in Costa Rica and was coordinated in conjunction with the Organization for Tropical Studies, so I stayed at all three of their biological stations (La Selva, Palo Verde, and Monteverde).

So, with my interest in “adventurous” field work, one may wonder what in the world I am doing in a Duke lab straining over how to configure a pipette. Well, somewhere between my freshman year and now, I accepted that all science is interconnected and that knowledge and skills acquired in one field can be directly or indirectly applied in all of the others (from general skills, like writing papers in scientific format, to using specific knowledge, like considering chemical messengers when studying animal behavior). Learning about other fields of science can also amplify one's specific interests: though I am interested in the fauna of the rainforest, I was oblivious before my introduction to the toxicology lab of the complexity of the whole other world that made up that life.

I have only been in Di Giulio's toxicology lab for four days now, but I can safely say that I am lucky to be in the lab I am in. I feel like the graduates and post-doc are exceptionally informative and patient and make up an atmosphere that I like being in. And, although my brain continues to feel mushy after a day of having the synergistic effects of Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons on the development of killifish explained to me (I will go into the lab's work in the next post), I wouldn't change a thing.

P.S. - These are Bryan and Dawoon, two of the graduate students responsible for mushing my brain.