EYE OF THE TURTLE

Everyone knows turtles move at low speed. Lori Cooper ’07 of Brackney, Pa., knows the slowness doesn’t end at locomotion. She is conducting experiments aimed at learning why a turtle’s pupils take much longer to dilate than a human’s when exposed to light.

A neuroscience major, Cooper is working as an EXCEL Scholar with James Dearworth, assistant professor of biology. “The goal is to try to identify the neural controls of the pupil. The turtle has the same sort of mechanism as humans, but the pupil response is much slower, and we’re not exactly sure why,” he says.

Cooper’s responsibilities focus on dilating turtles’ pupils with liquid solutions and measuring their response times at five- and ten-minute intervals over a three-hour period several times a week. This enables the researchers to learn how quickly the turtles’ optic nerves tell their brains to respond and the actual response times.

“I feel this experience gives me an advantage over everyone else who is competing for work in graduate school,” says Coper. She and Dearworth spent two weeks on the research at University of Alabama in Birmingham, where he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Vision Science Research Center. He expects that Cooper will present her research at a conference and coauthor an article with him that will be published in a scientific journal.

Winner of the javelin throw in the Lafayette-Lehigh spring dual meet, she placed seventh in the Patriot League Championships and qualified for the ECAC Championships. She also has participated in Alternative School Break.