Socrates Fellows Who We Are 2008-2009 Megan Eckles
Megan “Meg” Eckles is a field biologist and currently a Ph.D. cadidate in UCSD’s Ecology, Behavior and Evolution graduate program where she is studying the roles of communication and navigation systems in the behavioral ecology of social bees. Always fascinated by research involving behavior and cognition, she shares an equal passion for teaching, and has received numerous accolades and awards for presentations and workshops she has conducted in this regard.
Meg conducts field research in the rainforests of Panama where she has iinadvertently developed an adversarial relationship with the local spider monkeys.
“The Socrates Fellowship provided an opportunity for me to enhance my current teaching repertoire while offering something to the Socrates program and the schools in return,” says Meg, who conducts her research with mentor James Nieh. “My previous experience teaching high school biology gave me the opportunity to see what sort of lessons work best with different learning styles, which I hope will help the project I develop be more successful and influential.”
One of her goals as a Socrates Fellow is to use bees –and the important role they play in local ecology and pollination -- to teach students about the scientific method by demonstrating the different stages of forming and testing hypotheses. “Bees are keystone environmental species and have proven to be a productive model for studying the evolution of behavior, cognition, and sociality,” she says. “They are also important and active pollinators on plants in the San Diego environment, and wild populations of bees would lend themselves well to a study on pollination ecology. Hopefully students will connect more readily to a biological system they experience everyday and already relate to."
