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Clara Stahlmann Roeder O’Connor – MWC Chapter Scholar
1st Year Scholar, PhD candidate

Biology & Biomedical Engineering
University of Virginia

Research: 
My research studies how age and prior social experience affect the perception and response to social environments, focusing on fighting behavior in the long-lived forked fungus beetle, including how these factors influence future fighting success, strategies, mating behavior, and pheromone composition.

How Will Your Research Benefit Society?
All animals age and many animals, including humans, show strong behavioral responses to negative social experiences. My research seeks to determine how these near ubiquitous factors interact and decode the unnoticed mechanisms that communicate both age and experience. My findings are not directly applicable to humans, but they may offer novel perspectives on common patterns that we see in human society: the reduction of social interactions with age and the broad impacts of losing a competition on other behaviors and social interactions.

How Will an ARCS Award Benefit Your Research?
I have found that both age and prior fighting experience have a huge impact on social behavior, and I am currently testing the hypothesis that the beetles I study can communicate this through pheromones. This hypothesis cannot be tested using my field’s typical methods, which has driven me to incorporate techniques from analytical chemistry and chemical ecology. The ARCS award would support these combined multidisciplinary investigations, allowing me to ground the observed behavioral responses from my dissertation in the actual chemical communication given and perceived by an individual, together explaining both the mechanism and function of social communication.

Career Objectives: 
Following the completion of my PhD, I plan to pursue a post-doctoral fellowship that will expand my technical expertise and knowledge of the genetic basis of social behavior. I then hope to secure a tenure-track research faculty position at an R1 institution with a strong connection to a biological field station. There, I will establish a research program integrating the multidisciplinary methods I am developing to study the effects of aging and social experience on behavior, teaching this integrated approach to the next generation of scientists and conservation biologists.