Sophia Zhou
Education:
B.Sc. Agricultural and Medical Biotechnology. University of Kentucky
Expected Graduation: 2027
Sophia joined our lab for the summer of 2025, when she was a rising junior at the University of Kentucky, where her research journey began in high school with Dr. Nick Teets at the Department of Entomology. There, Sophia completed a capstone project assessing thermal limits in insects using computer-assisted motion detection, which sparked her passion for scientific discovery.
As a freshman, Sophia investigated mitochondrial footprints of T-cells in transgenic zebrafish to explore pediatric leukemia pathways in Dr. Jessi Blackburn’s lab at the College of Medicine. Later, in Dr. Qing Shao’s lab at the College of Engineering, she applied large language models to predict protein structures, allowing her to explore the intersection between computation and life sciences. Returning to the Teets lab in her sophomore year, Sophia led an independent project examining how temperature influences RNAi efficacy in the Colorado potato beetle.
During her summer research with us, Sophia explored CRISPR and metabolomics under the mentorship of Drs. Extavour and Jaiyesimi. She hopes to carry the insights gained from this experience into a future Ph.D. program, where she hopes to contribute to interdisciplinary research and develop into a broadly trained evolutionary biologist.
Beyond research, Sophia finds sanctuary and inspiration in visual art and dance. Both art and science are creative practices exploring complexity, cultivating focus, and expressing curiosity. Together, they offer a space for reflection, discovery, and dialogue.
Other Publications:Darrington M, J Solocinski, SK Zhou, MC Lecheta, SR Palli, YH Chen, NM Teets. 2024. Temperature, but not plant cultivar, influences the efficacy of insecticidal dsRNA in Colorado potato beetle. Insect Molecular Biology, 1-12.
Perez-Galvez, F R, SK Zhou, AC Wilson, CL Cornwell, D Awde, NM Teets. 2023. Scoring thermal limits in small insects using computer-assisted motion detection. Journal of Experimental Biology, 226 (22).
