9 months until graduation and things are looking bright

This semester has just flown by. I have sent off 384 bald and golden eagle blood samples to be analyzed on our SNP chip. I only have 96 samples left to extract and send off, then the 480 samples I need for my dissertation will have genotypic data available! I started writing my first chapter which looks at golden eagle mitochondrial DNA patterns through the United States and have a goal to have that to my committee by next month. Then, I only have 3 chapters of data to analyze and write so I can graduate by August 2017. That does not sound intimidating at all….

I have started preliminary analyses for most of the bald and golden eagles that will be in my nationwide study and things are really looking bright. After sorting for quality, I have about 35,000 SNPs for each species to work with. We are seeing structure in the golden eagles and we will know more about the bald eagles in about a week, as that is how long it takes for the program to run since the dataset is so large. I am working through these preliminary analyses as quickly and thoroughly as possible because we are giving an oral presentation at the American Wind and Wildlife Institute Conference at the end of next month. I am excited for the conference as I think it will be a great networking event and we will finally have data off our SNP chip to present. We plan on presenting preliminary information for both species, so I have a lot of work to complete up until the presentation.