every picture tells a story one of annabel perrys childhood favorites features her as a grinning 10-year-old clutching a gigantic bullfrog a slightly out-of-focus snapshot of both place and time that captures her budding interest in the natural world and her future as a scientist a career path and underlying passion accelerated by undergraduate research and key faculty mentors at texas a&m university this little girl with the bullfrog however didnt start out with all the tools she needed to succeed as a scientist perry who was homeschooled as a child in milford texas grew up believing that women were less logical than men evolution was not real and human behaviors were not biologically determined she didnt seriously question those beliefs until at the age of 16 after researching disordered eating in a dual-credit course she realized she had a serious eating disorder an awakening that not only propelled perry to seek professional mental health treatment but also instilled in her a desire to understand the biological underpinnings of psychiatric disorders this early experience with mental health care taught me that science can explain behavior and improve lives perry said so in fall 2018 i entered texas a&m university with a plan to scientifically study psychiatric disorders experiences at texas a&m and beyond developed this curiosity into a passion for cognitive evolution and showed me there is a place in the world of science for the little girl with the bullfrog although perry had planned to research disordered eating as a freshman at texas a&m she found no professors working on the topic however she soon discovered an intriguing alternative in texas a&m psychologist and neuroscientist brian andersons laboratory which explores how reward and punishment influence learning and attention in this lab i monitored an automated shock machine and recorded results as human subjects completed attention-intensive tasks perry said during the course of such work i discovered that i am interested not only in psychiatric disorders but in all manner of cognitive traits because perrys interest extended far beyond the proximate causes of behavior she enrolled in texas a&m biologist duncan mackenzies honors freshman biology course in addition to learning about evolution for the first time she says she fell in love with the interconnected mechanisms puzzle-solving and predictive power of evolutionary theory and wanted to pursue that passion by researching evolution i particularly wanted to research the evolution of sex differences as id been raised on stereotypes about cognitive differences between the sexes and wanted to learn their biological truth perry said so i joined texas a&m biologist gil rosenthals laboratory which studies sexual selection and mating behavior in swordtail fish after learning to use the labs tracking software used to study sex differences in swordtails perry realized that computational skills would be integral to her success as an evolutionary biologist when the covid-19 pandemic forced the rosenthal lab to work from home rosenthal encouraged all members to begin learning the python coding language rosenthal recognized perrys potential as a computational biologist and asked her to spearhead a bioinformatics project to detect variable dna regions in hybrid swordtail fish i took this opportunity to prove to the little girl with the bullfrog that gender does not determine her analytic ability perry said i spent summer 2020 teaching myself r and c++ since there was no existing program that could detect the dna regions i taught myself r to create my own but r could not process such large data so i taught myself the more robust but notoriously daunting language c++ the c++ version of my program polly ran successfully but categorized the wrong regions as polymorphic so i fixed polly getting it to correctly detect these regions in february 2021 bolstered by her burgeoning confidence in both coding and research perry excelled in graduate-level courses on experimental design and evolution as a junior and senior respectively in addition to beginning another c++ program for calculating linkage disequilibrium scores she was accepted into a summer 2021 national science foundation research experiences for undergraduates (reu) program at florida atlantic university as fate would have it she worked with erik duboué and alex keene who coincidentally accepted a new position as head of the texas a&m department of biology while she was in florida to study the evolution of anxiety in cavefish together they developed a computational neural network for classifying behaviors and used it to quantify anxiety in the mexican tetra model organism during this project i was simultaneously making polly more biologist-friendly by making it accessible through an easier-to-use coding language perry said by the end of summer 2021 i finished both the reu and polly projects i am first author on the polly manuscript which is currently under peer review at molecular ecology resources by the time perry returned to texas a&m for her senior year in august rosenthal had moved to italy and keene had begun his appointment as head of texas a&m biology while simultaneously completing her rosenthal lab projects remotely perry began conducting an undergraduate research scholars thesis with keene and fellow texas a&m biologist/computational evolutionary geneticist heath blackmon as one of the college of sciences 12 inaugural science undergraduate research opportunities program (surop) awardees for this project she coded a web-based tool dubbed cavecrawler to analyze genetics data in the mexican tetra an emerging model system to study the evolution of sleep and potentially many other cognitive and physiological traits a preprint of the resulting publication cavecrawler: an interactive analysis suite for cavefish bioinformatics was uploaded to the open access repository biorxiv in december and since has been accepted for publication by the genetics society of america journal g3: genes | genomes | genetics annabel is remarkably talented and her productivity was at the level of a senior graduate student keene said what really sets her apart is her enthusiasm for science and her ability to elevate everyone around her in between semesters in january perry traveled to central mexico to conduct field research with rosenthal and fellow swordtail lab members at the centro de lnvestigaciones cientificas de las huastecas aguazarca also known as cichaz roughly a month later she was the only undergraduate who presented her research at the 7th annual cavefish meeting* held february 27-march 4 in san antonio she also presented on her research and life-changing undergraduate experience at the april 1 college of science external advisory and development council spring meeting on saturday (may 14) perry will graduate from texas a&m with her bachelor of science in biology with honors along with double minors in neuroscience and philosophy in addition to being recognized as a university scholar undergraduate research scholar and honors fellow she was a finalist for the 2022 brown foundation-earl rudder memorial outstanding student award honoring the top graduating seniors across the entire texas a&m campus this fall she will head to harvard university to pursue her phd working with david reich in the department of human evolutionary biology working with someone like annabel could rekindle anyones enthusiasm for science rosenthal said when the pandemic hit we did a weekly python workshop as a lab over zoom we went through the wonderful rosalind website which presents every new technique as a puzzle she left the rest of us in the dust as she solved each puzzle with ever-growing enthusiasm till she was out of puzzles that other people had already solved now shes applying her full intellect and creativity to problems no one knows the answer to her infectious curiosity and her intellectual humility are just what harvard needs as she prepares to walk the reed arena stage perry says she is not only grateful for being able to stand on the shoulders of many including her mentors at texas a&m but also eager to pay those opportunities forward to benefit other aspiring scientists in the making a neuroscientists job is not just to investigate the innerworkings of the human brain but also to help other people realize the power of their own minds perry said in graduate school i plan to start coding workshops for rural children my eventual goal is to run my own lab where i mentor budding young scientists and use computational approaches to research cognitive evolution once i have my own lab i will continue this mentorship to show them that they like the little girl with the bullfrog can achieve their intellectual potential * this link is no longer active and has been removed learn more about undergraduate research in the texas a&m college of science and additional science advantage programs about research at texas a&m university: as one of the worlds leading research institutions texas a&m is at the forefront in making significant contributions to scholarship and discovery including that of science and technology research conducted at texas a&m generated annual expenditures of more than $1148 billion in fiscal year 2021 texas a&m ranked 14th in the most recent national science foundations higher education research and development survey based on expenditures of more than $1131 billion in fiscal year 2020 texas a&ms research creates new knowledge that provides basic fundamental and applied contributions resulting in many cases in economic benefits to the state nation and world to learn more visit research@texas a&m