Forging a path to a successful graduate career
As a girl, Lexi Menendez was fascinated by the menagerie of creatures harbored by her artist grandmother. Chickens, exotic birds, cats, dogs, and a host of other animals roamed the back yard, inviting curiosity.
“It was always like a zoo, hanging out at her house, interacting with animals and foraging for mushrooms,” says Menendez. “I started to love animals and fell in love with the natural world.”
Those back yard experiences ignited a passion for learning, and Menendez eventually enrolled in Carthage College, a small liberal arts school in her hometown of Kenosha, Wis., with the intention of getting a pre-veterinary degree.
But during her sophomore year, she saw a January-term posting for a field research project at the International Wolf Center in Ely, Minn., tracking wolves and collecting data in the Boundary Waters.
“We trudged through deep snow and used a passenger plane to track wolves, using aerial radio telemetry,” she says. “I loved it. I came back from that experience and dropped my pre-vet concentration and found a professor focusing on wildlife bioacoustics.”
Her passion for field research led her to use other J-terms to camp in the rainforests of northern Vietnam to use bioacoustics – the study of animal sounds to reveal their behavior and interactions – to research gibbons, and to Nicaragua’s volcanic Ometepe Island to study geomorphology.
But when Menendez graduated, she was confused about navigating graduate school. “I didn’t understand about networking and finding the right mentor, but I wanted to stay close to home,” she says. “There was no one in my life who had done this before, and I felt pretty isolated.”
Then her research advisor told her that the Morgridge Institute for Research was seeking a scholar to be part of the Postbaccalaureate Research Education Program (PREP), a one-year federally funded program designed to help underrepresented students transition to graduate school.
Menendez was accepted to the program and spent the 2023-24 school year in Daniela Drummond-Barbosa’s lab working to identify the role of different circulating sugars on fruit fly stem cell lineages in the ovary.
“You dig deep for those reserves and overcome obstacles you find in the lab.”
Lexi Menendez
“My field research experiences in minus-26-degree weather, and camping in Vietnam were hard mentally and physically and that taught me a lot about rigor and overcoming problems in the lab,” says Menendez, an avid ultimate Frisbee player. “You dig deep for those reserves and overcome obstacles you find in the lab.”
She presented her research findings this summer (July 2024) and PREP gave her the time and support to help her thoughtfully map out her future.
Having decoded graduate school culture, Menendez will begin her graduate program in September in UW-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. There, she’ll return to field research, studying wolf population dynamics and bioacoustics.
“I’m going back to my roots, and I’ll be doing some field seasons out with wolf biologists at Yellowstone National Park,” she says. “I’ll be using VHF collar data at the park to validate the use of bioacoustics as an appropriate mapping tool for wolf movements.”
Menendez credits Morgridge and the PREP program for jump-starting her research career and graduate school future.
“I genuinely don’t know if I would have ventured into grad school if I hadn’t found out about PREP,” she says. “Things flipped really quickly when I found I had another chance. The program gave me community and changed the trajectory of my life.”
Rising Sparks: Early Career Stars
Rising Sparks is a monthly profile series exploring the personal inspirations and professional goals of early-career scientists at the Morgridge Institute.
Rising Sparks: Lexi Menendez, regenerative biology
Lexi Menendez credits Morgridge and the PREP program for jump-starting her research career and graduate school future.
Rising Sparks: Kasia Wiech, biomedical imaging
Kasia Wiech, a graduate student in biomedical engineering, is on a mission to bring science out of the lab and into public spaces to highlight the impact of science in our everyday lives.
Rising Sparks: Roma Broadberry, Biomedical Imaging
Roma Broadberry, a biophysics graduate researcher in the Tim Grant Lab, is helping to illuminate the intricacy of viral replication using cryo-EM.
Rising Sparks: Andrés Tibabuzo, Regenerative Biology
From 'Jurassic Park' to snake venom to parasitic flatworms, Andrés Tibabuzo is motivated by the science that fascinates him.
Rising Sparks: Marcela Tabima, regenerative biology
Marcela Tabima has focused her fascination with human biology on two major research efforts in the Discovery Building — engineering synthetic arteries for surgery and finding new ways to treat inherited retinal diseases.
Rising Sparks: Katherine Overmyer, Metabolism
Katie Overmyer collaborates with metabolism researchers to push the boundaries of mass spectrometry technology and uncover answers to important biological questions.
Rising Sparks: Joe Li, Biomedical Imaging
"You can always learn more": An unquenchable thirst for discovery guides Joe Li’s pursuit of cutting-edge light-sheet microscopy.
Rising Sparks: Odette Herrand, Regenerative Biology
Odette Herrand is drawn to the inherent creativity involved in answering complex scientific questions, which they use to study fertility in the fruit fly.
Rising Sparks: Peter Ducos, Structural Biology
Peter Ducos leans on his military training to solve complex problems and collaborate with other scientists by exploring molecular structures in exquisite detail.
Rising Sparks: Kim Huggler, Metabolism
Kim Huggler believes science is fundamentally about creativity, and leverages an innovative cell culture media to reveal biological processes that conventional techniques cannot.
Rising Sparks: Ed Evans, Biomedical Imaging
Ed Evans sees every challenge as an opportunity to grow, and uses his passion for problem-solving to develop new imaging tools that will help other scientists.