Caroline Terry, fifth-year PhD candidate in the School of Biological Sciences, recently won the Best Student Presentation, Division of Comparative Physiology and Biochemistry, at the 2026 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting in Portland, OR.
Terry presented part of her research assessing copepod, or plankton, responses to multiple environmental stressors such as salinity or heat. In the course of her work, she traveled to collaborate with other researchers at the University of Toronto. There, the researchers developed a novel application for nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, or NMR spectroscopy. Typically used to identify the molecular structures of organic compounds in chemistry, the team successfully used the spectroscopic technique on live aquatic organisms.
“This technique allowed us to visualize what metabolites are changing in animals while they’re alive and whole, which is very novel when working with copepods, which are only a millimeter long,” said Terry. “There are some really exciting future directions for this NMR method, because this is the first time it has been done in a marine system.”
Terry’s collaborative research was supported by a CAS Graduate Research Award, the WSU NASA Space Grant Graduate Fellowship, and the Anne and Russ Fuller Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Research from the WSU Graduate School. She is currently working on her dissertation on the stress tolerances and survival rates of intertidal copepods and anticipates graduating this coming May.
Congratulations, Ms. Terry!