Recent biology graduate Christine Hodges now working for USDA

School of Biological Sciences graduate Christine Hodges ’11, M.S. ’14, is now a physical science technician in the laboratory of Susan McCormick at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Laboratory in Peoria.

Her research focuses on food safety through methods that reduce levels of mycotoxins that occur in grain crops as a result of fungal infection by various species of Fusarium. In the laboratory, she maintains fungal cultures and extracts and analyzes mycotoxins produced using GC-MS.

Hodges’ M.S. thesis research recently appeared in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, published by the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (Hodges et al. 2015. Cascading costs of reproduction in female house wrens induced to lay larger clutches. J. Evol. Biol. 28: 1383-1393).