Afreeka Phillips claims a comfortable seat in Uris Library before studying. The senior gained research experience early in her Cornell career. Frank DiMeo/University Photography
As a freshman, Afreeka Phillips was looking for a part-time job on campus. And what began as a data entry job in the neurobiology department turned into a position with Professor Stephen Emlen's eight-year research project.
"I came to Cornell wanting to go into genetics," said Phillips, now a senior. "We had done a unit in my high school science class on genetics -- punnett squares and that sort of thing -- and that piqued my interest."
But she couldn't find a job as a freshman on campus in genetics research -- until the end of that year when, while doing data entry for Emlen, she asked if he knew of any researchers doing genetic work.
"It turned out that he had been sending DNA samples to the Netherlands to be analyzed -- something I could do right on campus for him," Phillips said.
Emlen, professor of behavioral ecology, and Peter Wrege, senior research associate in behavioral ecology, had been studying jacanas, Panamanian shore birds, but were having a hard time determining the sex of the birds.
"The birds, when they are born, are too small to sex; and if they even survive to be adults, many of them disperse from the group. So we had been losing a lot of information that way," Emlen said. "Afreeka came in as a young student wanting to get genetic experience. We put her in contact with a scientist in the Netherlands so she could learn the molecular methods that allow you to tell the sex of a bird the day it hatches."
During the next summer, Phillips learned how to use the phenol chloroform isoamyl process to "clean" jacana chick blood, extract DNA and identify the female chromosome.
"Afreeka knows more about the process than I do; I'm not a molecular biologist," Emlen said. "And it was because of her that we were able to interpret the data on a lot more chicks and get into the questions about female jacana retardation.
"She was a great deal of help to us, because she was self-taught and self-motivated," Emlen said.
At the same time, Phillips became a Biology Ambassador through Associate Professor Ronald Booker's Neurobiology 420 class. With nine other Cornell students, she visited high school science classes in the Ithaca and Rochester area to teach young students about things she had been learning about DNA.
"We took over a lab and made up lesson plans to teach students about DNA fingerprinting, as if we were trying to get evidence in a paternity court case," she said.
Still, while Phillips said she enjoyed biology, she found that her interests were shifting to other areas of study at Cornell.
"I found I didn't have the stomach to be a doctor," she said. "I don't think my father stomached the idea of me leaving the medical track at first, either -- but I felt that wasn't what I wanted to do with the rest of my life."
Phillips switched into the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and she is in her final semester before earning a degree in agricultural, resource and managerial economics. Her plans are to get a job in sales or marketing before graduate school.
Meanwhile, the project she worked on for Emlen is about to be published.
"It was unusual at that time for someone so young to work on a research project," Emlen said of Phillips. "But it is important for young students to have a chance to experience research, hands-on, to see if they like it. In Afreeka's case, she found that her interests changed, but I think the experience was a helpful and enjoyable one."
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