“Pursue what you love even if it takes a lot of time, you are going to be living through those years anyway, you might as well spend them working towards the things you want and love in life.”

Taylor Hatcher is an undergraduate researcher at the University of Wyoming in the Dillon Lab.  Her expertise is RNA extraction and chill coma experiments on Bombus impatiens and Bombus vosnesenskii. Taylor’s favorite part of her job is handling the various species of bumble bees.  She enjoys being able to see them and their different characteristics up close in the field and lab setting. Taylor is currently working on running qPCR on treatment samples collected from her chill coma experiments during the summer.  She will be analyzing the data produced by those runs to continue her research. 

Taylor first realized she wanted to be a scientist in her Animal Biology class.  Until that point in her academic career, Taylor thought she would pursue a medical degree but soon realized that she wanted to work as a research scientist.  Her dream project would be developing and implementing new insect conservation techniques in the face of changing climates. If Taylor hadn’t pursed her love of science, she would be a tattoo artist or an opera singer. 

One of Taylor’s memorable moments in the lab was when she was learning to run samples on agarose gel.  Taylor mixed each of her samples with the bp ladder instead of the 6x dye.  Her mistake resulted in many gels that did not work in the beginning of the experiment due to this minor detail.  

Taylor enjoys mountain biking and hiking in her free time and the best advice she’s received from a mentor: “Pursue what you love even if it takes a lot of time, you are going to be living through those years anyway, you might as well spend them working towards the things you want and love in life.”