Jessica Farrell of the Duffy Lab Defends her Phd! 

On January 24^th, Jessica Farrell, a graduate student advised by David Duffy, Assistant Professor of Wildlife Disease Genomics, successfully defended her Ph.D. entitled “Assessing Florida Sea Turtle Populations and their Fibropapillomatosis Tumor Pandemic”. 

During her Ph.D., Dr. Farrell applied molecular and histological approaches to better understand endangered sea turtles and their threats. Dr. Farrell’s Ph.D. married field and lab based approaches, enabling the development of environmental DNA approaches to track sea turtles in the wild and improving our understanding of the virally induced sea turtle tumor disease, fibropapillomatosis. This work made an important contribution to the conservation of sea turtle species and improving our ability to care for wild sea turtles suffering from the devastating fibropapillomatosis disease. Dr. Farrell has published her work in the top journals in her field (including Communications Biology and BioScience). Dr. Farrell’s outreach work includes several media articles published by The Conversation. In addition to her outreach contribution to media outlets, Jessica assisted with the Student Science Training Program for two consecutive summers. Jessica has presented to numerous community groups, high school groups and general outreach opportunities. Throughout her Ph.D Dr. Farrell received several awards including two University of Florida International Student Awards, a National Save the Sea Turtle Foundation studentship and a Friends of Gumbo Limbo, Gordon J. Gilbert Graduate Grant. Dr. Farrell is the first Ph.D student to graduate from Whitney Lab’s Sea Turtle Hospital research program. 

These are a small subset of accomplishments that Dr. Farrell achieved while completing her Ph.D. at the Whitney Laboratory and in the University of Florida’s Department of Biology. We are very excited to celebrate her success and are looking forward to celebrating her future successes as she continues her impressive career. We have been very lucky to have her at Whitney and wish her the best of luck in all of her future endeavors!