Hello Penguin Fans! I'm Jack Cerchiara and in addition to being a lover of all things penguin, I am Dee's newest PhD student. I grew up in Scottsdale, AZ and attended Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio for my undergraduate education. Fighting through a whirlwind of majors, from Religious Studies, to Abnormal Psychology and Pre-Med, I finally found a love of Physiological Ecology. I was very fortunate as an undergrad to become involved in field ecology research, and began studying songbird populations and the stress of the harsh Ohio winter on their immune function.
After graduating from Kenyon College, I spent the following summer working at the Bowdoin Scientific Station on Kent Island, a remote study island in the Bay of Fundy, Canada. Here, I studied the immune function Leach's storm-petrels. I became fascinated with how the physiology of these small long-living seabirds allowed them to live so long. I really came to love working in the field, and made the decision to continue to graduate school.
After spending a year working in a lab at Arizona State University, where I studied the physiology of bird coloration, I came to the University of Washington in the Fall of 2007 and immediately had the honor of spending my first quarter of graduate study working at Punta Tombo. I am currently pursuing a PhD in Biology, focusing on physiological ecology.
