“I think I should get a gold star for my dedication,” McKitrick said of her research in the Bocas del Toro archipelago of Panama.

This 27-year-old’s dedication has already gotten her quite far: from being a wide-eyed child obsessed with the Discovery Channel to a star pupil in UO’s undergraduate biology courses to where she is now, a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University.

As a child in Bend, Oreg., McKitrick imagined her work would entail playing with dolphins. But as an undergraduate she quickly learned her research would never be that romantic, she said.

In the UO Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, she spent hours scrubbing the scum off mosquito dishes.

Yet McKitrick remained committed and she even did so with exuberance, said biology professors Bill Bradshaw and Christina Holzapfel, who McKitrick still refers to as her “academic parents.” The research team spoke with pride of the young biologist whom they remember attended lab meetings wearing pajamas.

“Of the hundreds of undergrads we’ve worked with, Tanya is in the top 1 percent,” Holzapfel said.

McKitrick’s senior thesis of the pitcher-plant dwelling mosquito, they pointed out, was more appropriate for a master’s student.

“But she handled her thesis with great perseverance and gave a fine lucid defense of it,” Bradshaw said, remembering that McKitrick even bought a gray flannel suit for the presentation. No more PJs. She was establishing her professional research career.

A few months later McKitrick started in Stanford’s marine biology program.

“When I came to grad school to start my degree, I was going to change the world. I wanted to apply my research to conservation-minded interests,” McKitrick said.

But in the spring of her first year, a different cause took priority.

Her husband, UO alum Chris Dempsey (’03 Chinese/International Studies), was diagnosed with cancer. For the next two years, McKitrick took care of her husband and read everything she could about cancer biology and treatment options to help him make decisions about how to battle the disease. Through the course of this extracurricular research, McKitrick began to connect the dots between the biology of cancer and her work as an evolutionary ecologist.

“I started thinking about cancer in the terms of ecology and cancer cells as individuals competing for resources,” she said. And the parallels were too intriguing for her to ignore.

With her husband’s cancer in remission, McKitrick returned to the laboratory with renewed energy and a new focus: to try to find answers to some interesting questions about ecology and evolution in terms of immunology and cell biology.

To do so, McKitrick is working in the marine laboratories of Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station on the Monterey Peninsula of California. Though she still doesn’t get to swim with dolphins, McKitrick prefers studying her new animals: Botryllus schlosseri, known commonly as sea squirts.

These dime-sized invertebrates, known for their tendency to spray water when touched, hold particular interest for McKitrick because they undergo blood-based transplantation reaction and reproduce rapidly.

“It takes just a week for them to re-grow and replace themselves. They’re great systems for studying genetics and doing mini experiments because they’re always growing,” she said. “They are the fruit flies of the sea.”

These daisy-shaped creatures dwell in high-nutrient harbor areas where the competition is so fierce that they will often grow together, but only if they recognize each other as relatives and can share a common blood supply. If not, they reject one another. In essence, they reject or accept their neighbors’ blood in a manner similar to the reaction between human cells and transplanted organs and tissue.

Since these animals are the most closely related invertebrates to vertebrates, McKitrick said, her research could have implications for how the vertebrate immune system has evolved.

“She’s looking at a reaction that looks a lot like part of our immune system,” said McKitrick’s advisor Tony de Tomaso, assistant professor at Stanford. These marine organisms are particularly fascinating for looking at human diseases, he said, since they are evolutionary predecessors to the human. He acknowledged that this type of research is somewhat rare but said the unusual approach could prove to be groundbreaking.

For the next three years, McKitrick will continue to study the sea squirts for her doctoral thesis, trying to answer a few of the questions that keep her up at night. After graduation, she hopes this project will give her the tools and experience to move into cellular biology research of cancer stem cells.

— KC