Emily Pierce M.S. (School of Marine and Environmental Programs, CAS) won the Mary Rice Best Student Presentation Award for her talk “Squishy versus crunchy: physical characteristics affect invasive species detection using environmental DNA” at the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology, SICB, conference in Austin, TX. SICB is a national conference attended by close to 2000 scientists nation-wide. Pierce is a Ph.D. student in the Crab Lab of Markus Frederich, Ph.D. (Professor of Marine Science, College of Arts and Sciences, School or Marine and Environmental Programs). Pierce’s project investigates novel ways of detecting and monitoring invasive species and is funded through Dr. Frederich’s NSF EPSCoR grant in collaboration with the University of Maine, Orono.