GPSS Feature Friday: Ellie Field

Starting this week, the Graduate College will be posting new features from the Graduate and Professional Student Senate. These features will focus on the lives of different Iowa State graduate students. Every post is written by another graduate student and edited lightly by Graduate College Communications Specialist Sarah Igram.

Today's Feature Friday focuses on Entomology Ph.D. student Ellie Field. She is in the second year of her doctorate, and you can find her on Twitter. This post was written by graduate student Amanda Bries.

What sparked Ellie's interest in entomology was taking various trips around the world.

"I went on a humanitarian mission in Guatemala. While I was traveling, there was a Chikungunya outbreak [a mosquito-borne virus], which brought in public health specialists who interviewed people about their symptoms and exposures, and collected mosquito samples," she said. "I immediately thought to myself, 'I want to do that. I could see myself in this position.'"

Ellie Field

Ellie earned a Master's in Global Health at Georgetown University and conducted a mosquito surveillance and dengue awareness study in Pondicherry, India. After completing her Master's degree, she continued with her interest in mosquitoes. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Entomology and works in Assistant Professor Ryan Smith's lab.

What motivates Ellie every day is the curiosity about her research. Despite the challenges, she is working on one first-author publication and two co-authored publications across a wide range of areas within medical entomology.

"I am planning to do E. coli and phagocytosis challenges to investigate Culex mosquito immune system changes over the year, as well as identify behavioral and reproductive changes," she said.

Ellie is walking away with many tools from her Ph.D. Her doctoral research has been dynamic: ranging from field work to computational statistics to molecular methods in the lab.

"What I love about my field is discovery. Every field season, we're finding new species, new interactions, or new methods to evaluate mosquitoes. There is so much to learn," she said. Post-graduation, she hopes to work for the Center for Disease Control, as an entomologist who investigates vector-borne disease outbreaks and studies vector populations.

The sophistication doesn't stop with her entomological research. Ellie is fascinated by exploring and practicing various languages with the web platform Duolingo. After comfortably speaking Spanish and French, she has moved onto Russian, which she loves because of the grammatical challenges it brings. Her favorite Russian saying is "Без муки нет науки," which translates to: "Without torture, there is no science," or "No pain, no gain."