ECR Spotlight – Zandra Santa Rita

ECR Spotlight is a series of interviews with early-career authors from a selection of papers published in Journal of Experimental Biology and aims to promote not only the diversity of early-career researchers (ECRs) working in experimental biology but also the huge variety of animals and physiological systems that are essential for the ‘comparative’ approach. Zandra Marielle Santa Rita is an author on ‘ Responses of a locust visual interneuron correlate with simple and compound object motion within the vertical plane’, published in JEB. Zandra conducted the research described in this article while an undergraduate research student in Jack Gray's lab at University of Saskatchewan, Canada. Zandra is now a graduate student in the lab of Sandra Scott and Douglas Adler at University of British Columbia, Canada, investigating how hands-on learning and mentorship contribute to improving student outcomes, with the aim of developing inclusive pedagogical practices that empower underrepresented minority (URM) students to succeed in STEM fields.