The University of Florida has awarded me a 4 year stipend and tuition coverage for my PhD work on West African manatees! I'm really excited and a bit overwhelmed by this generous award. It will certainly help ease the burden of my fundraising efforts so I can focus on my research, and it will also give me the time to take those classes I'm going to need (thankfully not many, but I'll be struggling my way through BioChem!). My dissertation research will focus on the status, distribution and ecology of the West African manatee using genetics and behavioral tools. I'm looking forward to working with the other manatee researchers at UF, they are a very supportive and fun bunch, and hopefully they can teach me something about genetics analysis, since this field researcher hasn't been in a laboratory in a long, long time! Stay tuned for stories about broken glassware...