Megan Gittinger
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Megan Gittinger was a workstudy student in Lynn’s lab at Virginia Tech, who received a Research Experiences for
Undergraduates summer fellowship in 2004. Megan completed her degree in December 2004 and then worked in Lynn’s
lab in Massachusetts to complete her very ambitious research project. Megan’s research uses a comparative approach
with over 30 species in the Nicotiana genus to ask how reliance on pollinators predicts floral morphology and nectar
rewards across species. Lynn is asking a related question with the same project: does pollinator reliance predict
the evolution of defensive chemistry in leaves, flowers and nectar? Dr. Michael Wink of the University of Heidelberg,
Germany, Dr. Geoff Morse of Arizona State University-West, and Dr. Ben Normark of UMass-Amherst are collaborators.
These results will be written for publication pending final chemical and phylogenetic analysis of data.
Megan has since worked as a GIS intern at the Smithsonian Institute, and in Nov 2005 moved to Thailand to work for
a non-governmental organization addressing poaching concerns in conservation.