Dana is active in soccer, lacrosse, and basketball and plays in a jazz band. She enjoys camping and hiking in Montana. Dana will most likely blend her interests in math and science to pursue a career in environmental science. Dana has a strong commitment to the environment and notes that "even children can make a difference in our environment."
Dana's mother is her science hero. "[My mother] always showed a great interest in science, which she passed down to me," Dana says.
Inspired by an article she read in Science News about the effects of light pollution on animals, Dana decided to see how light pollution specifically affected daphnia, a miniscule crustacean that lives in ponds and lakes.
Dana tracked the migration habits of daphnia in a controlled test-tube environment during both daytime and nighttime hours without any kind of artificial light. She did the same thing using a simulated pond environment and by taking samples from varying depths from an actual pond. Once she established the natural migration of daphnia, Dana repeated the same experiments while introducing three kinds of artificial light, halogen, florescent, and incandescent. Dana found that daphnia were in fact attracted to artificial light, which directly affected the animals' migrating habits.
