In the run up to her May 6 graduation, PBS major Sydney Brotheridge was busy learning Swahili.
Why is a senior who is about to begin a job as a researcher so intent on gaining this new skill in her final weeks of college? She will be doing work for which she was well-trained as an undergraduate researcher in Professor Jonathon Crystal’s Comparative Cognition Lab. There she worked with rats to conduct studies of animal memory, which capitalize on these animals’ keen sense of smell to identify features of memory they share with humans to find promising new treatments for diseases like Alzheimer’s, that involve severe memory loss.
Yet Brotheridge will not just be working in any lab. She is working in a lab in Morogoro, Tanzania, at a Belgian company called Apopo, where researchers study and prepare African giant-pouched rats to perform tasks quite different from those they perform in Crystal’s lab. Through research and training at the lab, these “hero rats” learn to sniff out landmines in countries where landmines litter the landscape and to detect positive TB samples more accurately than existing medical tests.
