Natalie Bennett is a second-year PhD student in the Biomedical Informatics and Computational Biology (BICB) Program in the College of Science and Engineering (she has dual citizenship between CSE and CBS). She is a Research Affiliate at the Mayo Clinic in the Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine in the Department of Internal Medicine. A Minnesota native she ventured out of state for undergraduate. She received her BA in Biology and English Literature from DePauw University. Her thesis focused on scientific papers into infographics to increase their accessibility for non-science audiences where she used Dr. Rosalind Franklin’s paper on the structure of DNA as a case study. Natalie hopes to continue making scientific research more accessible for all audiences in her PhD. She has worked in a variety of labs across the spectrum of Biology from microbiology, clinical, computational biology, organismal, and ecology. Natalie is fascinated in integrating computer science with animal behavior to change the way intraspecies interactions are studied using cephalopods. After her PhD Natalie hopes to join the Foreign Service where she aims to impact diplomacy through scientific policy. When Natalie isn’t in the lab coding away she can be found gathering random facts on a surprise expedition, following her stomach to some hole in the wall eatery, or creating.
Current Research:
Natalie is exploring cephalopod perception and cognition through an interdisciplinary approach that combines traditional qualitative methods of animal behavior with the quantitative methods of machine learning and AI. She will use high-speed high-resolution videography of social interactions and computer modeling to analytically study social interactions of octopus and cuttlefish.
Research Interests: Intraspecies Interactions, Computational Biology, Perception, Machine Learning, Cognition, Artificial Intelligence
Selected publications:
Current Research:
Natalie is exploring cephalopod perception and cognition through an interdisciplinary approach that combines traditional qualitative methods of animal behavior with the quantitative methods of machine learning and AI. She will use high-speed high-resolution videography of social interactions and computer modeling to analytically study social interactions of octopus and cuttlefish.
Research Interests: Intraspecies Interactions, Computational Biology, Perception, Machine Learning, Cognition, Artificial Intelligence
Selected publications:
- Bohm EK, Vangorder-Braid JT, Jaeger AS, Moriarty RV, Baczenas JJ, Bennett NC, O'Connor SL, Fritsch MK, Fuhler NA, Noguchi KK & Aliota MT. (2021). Zika virus infection of pregnant Ifnar1-/- mice triggers strain-specific differences in fetal outcomes. J Virol. JVI0081821. DOI: 10.1128/JVI.00818-21.
- Bennett NC. (2019). Infographic of Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate by Dr. Rosalind E. Franklin and R.G. Gosling. Piktochart. https://create.piktochart.com/output/38528801-franklin-infographic
