STIP Student Angelina Mauriello Explores Ecology Meeting Forensic Entomology.

Being a forensic science major, there are lots of fields in this career that you could become interested in. With this summer research project, it introduced me to a lesson known field in forensic science, entomology. Forensic entomology is the use of insects in legal investigations. I was very interested in this project to see what I would find and figure out in this field that is less known and implement that in forensic investigations. Because this was a team effort, we were able to come up with different hypotheses to test based on the data we collected and analyzed. This helped open up to many different questions in forensic entomology that can be useful in real time.

This project definitely helped me dive into what research exactly is and practice lab skills needed for a future career. Our weeks this summer were spent analyzing our data from just one week of collection. The most stressful part was just learning in the first couple days how to analyze our data. After we got the hang of it, it was simple. However, we did have a lot of data so it literally took until the last day of the project to complete.

With this research project, I discovered I have patience and a willingness to learn. I learned about the field of forensic entomology, I learned how to conduct a research project, and I learned how a lab setting job is to just have patience. . I learned from others and improved my own skills and knowledge about this field. It was especially important to engage with each other’s work, ask questions, and learn about various scenarios. Many of these hypotheses turned out exactly how we expected and others were not similar to our expectations. This leads to having more research done in forensic entomology to hopefully be better understood.