Helen Burch, ’17

I am currently a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech researching Late Triassic vertebrate communities. My lab travels to the deserts of Texas and Arizona every summer to collect fossils of reptiles over 200 million years old. My research seeks to adapt methods used to characterize community ecology in the modern to learn about faunal transitions near major extinctions in the fossil record. Last October, I published a paper describing a new species of venomous reptile from a site in the Chinle Formation of Arizona.

The Summer Science Program gave me my very first experiences in coding, which I now use quite a lot for my research. Though I have switched from python to R, I felt secure knowing that if I can learn the terminology and conventions for any language, I can code whatever I need. I loved nights at the Etscorn Observatory and late hours in the computer lab, and though I moved away from space, the Summer Science Program made it clear to me that research would be a part of my future career.

The most amazing part of Summer Science Program was certainly the people. My roommate, Alya Al-kibbi, and I have kept in touch through the past eight years, visiting each other throughout college (with further intent to do so during our respective PhD programs) and together we celebrate our shared determination to continue learning every day and follow our research questions as far as they can take us. I also think fondly of our trip to White Sands, which was such an incredible and silly experience in an environment I had never experienced before— truly and unearthly place and so cool to visit during a program focused on space.