Jake Botello successfully presented and defended his PhD dissertation research - and we are all the wiser about discipline based education research and mito-nuclear ecology for it!
Jake has been at Auburn a few years, got the beetle lab up and running, weathered a global pandemic, and mastered the art of video game design. At the end of it all, Jake completed his dissertation with a successful defense! It was great to see the fruits of his labors designing video games to teach evolution and testing hypotheses for the quantitative genetic basis to mito-nuclear interactions!
Jake is moving on to a Visiting Assistant Professor position at St. Mary’s College in Maryland where he will start up as a lead on a new NSF grant to develop and investigate the efficacy of video games in teaching evolution. Go get ‘em Dr. Botello!