Rising Sparks: Lexi Menendez, regenerative biology

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.

Lexi Menendez
Lexi Menendez

“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: Raison Dsouza, structural biology

Rising Sparks: Raison Dsouza, structural biology

Raison Dsouza is developing new computational methods to analyze cryo-electron microscopy images, trying to find specific particles in “noisy,” corrupted data. 

Rising Sparks: Lexi Menendez, regenerative biology

Rising Sparks: Lexi Menendez, regenerative biology

Lexi Menendez credits Morgridge and the PREP program for jump-starting her research career and graduate school future.

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Rising Sparks: Joe Li, biomedical imaging

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Rising Sparks: Odette Herrand, regenerative biology

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Rising Sparks: Peter Ducos, structural biology

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Rising Sparks: Kim Huggler, metabolism

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Rising Sparks: Ed Evans, biomedical imaging

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