Welcome Bryce and Melissa!

The Sethuraman Lab welcomes two new graduate students, Bryce Summerhays and Melissa Lynch this Fall!

Bryce is a born, and home-grown San Diegan who has always had a passion for nature having a documentary filmmaker for a father. He has worked with exotic animal species for over 10 years, first volunteering when he was 16, teaching people about animals and conservation. He attended Palomar College and then went on to graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Biology at the University of California, San Diego. He currently works for the San Diego Zoo, Safari Park, continuing his work with animals and passion for conservation. He volunteered for a year assisting in the Holway Lab at UCSD getting his first taste of working in a field and on a paper ("The broader ecological effects of species invasion on protection mutualisms", LeVan et al. 2013)

His interests include population genetics and conservation.

Melissa is no stranger to the lab - she has been working with us since Fall 2016 as an undergraduate researcher. She will continue her work on un-sampled "ghost" populations, and developing new software/methods for studying it as a Masters student. She also recently won a travel award to the Population Genomics Symposium at the EMBO in Italy!