Santino recently received his Master’s degree in Entomology-Crop, Breeding, and Health at the University of Antananarivo, where he studied the impacts of forest fragmentation on ant assemblages in central Madagascar, which required extensive insect dissection and taxonomic identification using a key. He also worked as a Research Assistant on the bat team (‘Ekipa Fanihy’) of Dr. Cara Brook, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. Through this work, he developed skills in field biology (trapping and collecting blood, urine, fecal, saliva, and ectoparasite samples from fruit bats), in molecular analysis (RNA/DNA extraction and PCR), and in data processing and computation (analysis of long-term morphological data). Recently, he co-first-authored a manuscript from this work (Andrianiaina* & Andry* et al. 2021, currently in review at the Journal of Mammalogy). Now, Santino is spending 3 months at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health to be trained in fecal parasitology.
Christopher Golden's Faculty Website
