Four students from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, including two from Allegheny County, are headed to Central America in June as presenters at an international symposium on biodiversity in Honduras.

The seminar, organized by their IUP faculty advisor, Dr. Josiah Townsend, will focus on the group’s research on biodiversity in Honduras.

Biology graduate students Daniel Dudek Jr., of McKeesport and Justin O’Neill of North Hills, will be among the IUP student presenters.

The four-day symposium, titled “Patterns of Evolutionary Diversification in Amphibians from Honduras: Challenges, Advances, and Opportunities,” will be hosted by the National Autonomous University of Honduras in Valle de Sula (UNAH-VS) June 5-9.

“The students will present the results of their research projects at IUP in order to return the scientific results to the hosts and collaborators that made the work possible in the first place,” Townsend said. “This should be an outstanding experience for our students and participants alike, and will continue to strengthen IUP’s ties to UNAH,” he said

Dudek, a 2012 graduate of McKeesport High School, received his undergraduate degree from Penn State in 2016. He worked as a temporary faculty in the biology department at IUP this year and is president and coordinator of the Biology Graduate Student Society. He won the Pennsylvania Academy of Science Best Graduate Poster Presentation, is a 2019 graduate recipient and won the best graduate platform presentation at the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania University Biologists.

“I work with Dr. Townsend studying the evolution and taxonomy of leopard frogs found throughout Mesoamerica, with a focus on phylogenetics, basically, studying the genetic relationships between populations to develop a genetic framework that we can work from that allows us to determine possible new species,” Dudek said.

O’Neill is a 2010 graduate of North Hills Senior High School. In addition to this work in the Townsend Lab, he is a member of the Indiana Storm Water Education Partnership.

“My work contributes to an overarching lab effort to describe a number of new or understudied leopard frog species from Central America,” O’Neill said. “Specifically, I use statistical modeling to create maps that approximate the geographic areas where the species may inhabit.”

Additional IUP student presenters include Esbeiry Cordova-Ortiz of Avondale and Ayla Ross of State College, Pa.

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