After she graduates from the University of Lynchburg this month with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, Katie Roderick ’19 is headed to the University of Hawaii to pursue a PhD in behavioral neuroscience.
Roderick said she was “absolutely over the moon” to have been accepted at Hawaii, which was her first-choice graduate school. “I have never been to Hawaii before so I will be attending sight unseen,” she said. “University of Hawaii was, in fact, my first choice so it was really exciting to get the news that I got in.”
It might be easy to think geography was the driving force behind Roderick’s choice, but it was actually honeybees. At Hawaii, she will be studying relational learning in honeybees with Dr. Patricia Couvillon, an associate professor in the College of Social Sciences and an expert in honeybee behavior.
“I think a lot of people assumed I applied because it’s Hawaii. Who wouldn’t want to go to Hawaii? But what initially piqued my interest was Dr. Couvillon,” Roderick said. “When researching behavioral neuroscience programs, I found a description laying out her research and I just knew it was exactly what I wanted to do.
“The fact that she was located at the University of Hawaii was only a bonus. … It just seems so surreal. My dream program and it’s in Hawaii? How often does that even happen?”
Roderick credits the care and dedication of Lynchburg’s psychology faculty with helping make her dream come true. She said Dr. Keith Corodimas helped her connect with Dr. Couvillon, and then he, Dr. Virginia Cylke, and former psychology department chair Dr. Bianca Sumutka wrote letters of recommendation and helped with her application.
Dr. Pepper Hanna critiqued her thesis, Dr. Ei Hlaing advised her on technical issues, and Dr. Alicia Marciano, Dr. Domenica Favero, Dr. Donald Werner, and lab instructor Dylan Elliot all attended her thesis defense.
“To have an entire department filled with professors so committed to helping their students learn and succeed truly is special,” Roderick said. “Yes, my professors care that I succeed in school, but they also care that I succeed in life. They want to see me reach my goals and be happy, and they will do, and have done, everything in their power to help.”
Asked to explain what she’ll be researching in Hawaii — relational learning in honey bees — Roderick was happy to oblige. “To give you a simple definition, relational learning is a more complex type of learning that involves making associations between various stimuli, contexts, behaviors, and outcomes,” she said.
“It essentially requires a subject to understand a single stimulus and then understand how that stimulus is related — hence the relational component — to other stimuli. Honeybees are used as a model because other researchers have noted that honeybee learning is similar to vertebrate learning so the research translates well to other animal models.”
At Lynchburg, Roderick was part of the “Research Dream Team,” a trio of psychology majors who spent a year studying zebrafish behavior with Dr. Corodimas. Asked if her honeybee research will be similar, Roderick said, “Not at all. With the zebrafish, we were focused on if daily exercise and structural enrichment could act as an anxiolytic (reduce/prevent anxiety).
“The research I will be working on at Hawaii focuses more on the actual process of learning, how subjects can make associations, and how complex those associations can be. In all honesty, I never saw myself working with honeybees, especially considering that all my research experience is with zebrafish.
“Honeybees just so happen to be Dr. Couvillon’s animal of choice and I thought it would be fun to get out of my comfort zone and work with different animal models.”
The behavioral neuroscience program at Hawaii, which is an integrated master’s-to-PhD program, will take Roderick five to eight years to complete. When she finishes, Roderick said she wants to teach at a university like Lynchburg.
“I want to be a professor at a small liberal arts university,” she said. “I want to do for others what the amazing professors in the psychology department at Lynchburg have done for me. They inspired me to love learning, to love research, and to aim to be a lifelong learner. I hope that one day I can be a mentor to undergrads in the same way that my professors were mentors to me.”
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After she graduates from the University of Lynchburg this month with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, Katie Roderick ’19 is headed to the University of Hawaii to pursue a PhD in behavioral neuroscience.
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