Kristin Beale 924

A native of Maine, Kristin Beale earned a bachelor's of science degree from the University of Maine Farmington in 2007 where she researched heart disease in calves. She then served as a research assistant at Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratories creating a genetic database for Lobsters and looking at gene expression changes when lobsters were exposed to a bacterium called Vibrio fluvialis. In 2008 she came to Brown University for graduate studies in the lab of Professor Mark Johnson. Her current thesis work involves characterizing the pollen mutant hap2, which results in sperm that are unable to fuse with female sex cells in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. She expects to graduate with a PhD in the summer of 2013.