During Summer 2024, I had the opportunity to visit Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, U.S.A. As I moved into the final year of my PhD (looking at the form and function of mustelid mammal genitalia), I was eager to reach out to external institutions to meet new academics, learn new expertise, and to share my own research with others in the field.
A renowned liberal arts college, I was keen to visit Mount Holyoke primarily to work with Prof. Patricia Brennan, an expert in the field of functional morphology of genital evolution, a pioneer of novel techniques to visualise internal soft-tissue anatomy, and an all-around great person! Whilst staying in Amherst I spent lots of time with Prof. Brennan and her family on their farm, picking blueberries and walking their lovely dogs. However, most of my time was spent on campus, working as a visiting researcher at Mount Holyoke alongside Prof. Brennan, her post-doc student Rachel Keeffe, and her undergraduate student summer team. My goal whilst working in her lab on site was to refine my dissection skills, learn to recognise primate genital anatomy, and to correctly store all samples ready for future stain and scanning. As a tenured professor at a U.S. institution, Prof. Brennan had access to cadaveric specimens that would be extremely difficult to access in the U.K. and it was fascinating to learn from, and work with her in the laboratory on these primate samples. In total I dissected 15 specimens from three species – rhesus macaques, squirrel monkey and vervet monkey and have stored them ready for future research.
Whilst visiting, I also attended the Mount Holyoke Summer Symposium and learnt about the great science being conducted by the other labs over the summer. I also had the opportunity to travel with Prof. Brennan and her lab to Montreal, Canada to attend an international conference, Evolution 2024, where I met academics from around the world. Here I got to experience a variety of great talks and chatted to many about my own PhD research. By the end of my trip, I was eager to return to complete my thesis and continue working on great science. At a time when my thesis deadline was looming, my trip to Massachusetts gave me a boost in confidence and a much-needed spark of inspiration.
