A Story of Perseverance & Community

When people imagine a PhD project, they often picture a carefully planned journey with clear questions, clean experiments and steady progress toward an answer, with the ability to redo the same experiment unlimited times if something goes wrong. That was certainly how I envisioned mine. What I did not anticipate was how often the plan would unravel, or how much my project would change shape along the way. What I learned, though, is that perseverance in research is not about sticking rigidly to a plan. It is about staying committed to the questions, even when the path looks nothing like what you expected.

As a PhD student and FFAR Fellow at North Carolina State University, my research focuses on Bt corn, a genetically engineered crop that produces proteins toxic to major insect pests such as Helicoverpa zea, commonly known as corn earworm or bollworm. Bt crops are an important tool in sustainable agriculture because they reduce the need for chemical insecticides, benefiting farmers, pollinators

and surrounding ecosystems. However, these benefits depend on effective resistance management. If pests evolve resistance too quickly, Bt technology loses its value.

To slow resistance evolution, the EPA requires farmers to plant refuges, which are areas of non-Bt corn that maintain populations of susceptible insects. These refuges can be planted as structured blocks or as seed blends, where Bt and non-Bt seeds are mixed together. My research asks whether these different refuge strategies influence insect fitness, which is an organism’s ability to contribute to the next generation, in ways that could affect how resistance spreads. Specifically, I examine whether developmental exposure to Bt affects adult reproductive traits such as mating success, pheromone response

and spermatophore production. These traits are essential to understanding population-level outcomes.

To answer these questions, I conducted field studies across North and South Carolina and followed them with intensive behavioral and physiological experiments in the lab. Much of my project relied on a series of tightly timed mating experiments, meaning individual moths had to be paired during very specific windows of adult activity and observed closely over the course of the night. I only had one opportunity per field site per season, and many sites overlapped. Losing a field season did not just mean lost data. It meant pushing back my timeline, wasting a significant amount of money and potentially losing the ability to answer the core questions of my dissertation. The field trials themselves were extremely time-consuming. Plots with blended refuge had to be hand-marked so we knew exactly which seeds were Bt and which were non-Bt.

I prepared extensively using lab-reared insects and existing protocols. Everything worked smoothly. Then the field insects arrived, and nothing worked.

I could not get a single pair to mate.

Suddenly, the entire foundation of my project felt unstable. Unlike lab insects, the field-collected moths would not adjust to a reversed light cycle. Because corn earworms are active at night, this meant staying up all night running experiments and then continuing to work throughout the day. The work ran seven days a week, and every failed attempt carried the weight of knowing I did not get another chance.

To make matters worse, my advisor, who is normally incredibly present and responsive, was out of the country with limited service. When I realized I was truly on my own, I panicked. I doubted my ability to make decisions and felt like I suddenly knew nothing at all.

A postdoc I was collaborating with, Charles, stayed up with me most nights, troubleshooting protocols and working through problems in real time. My husband, who is also a graduate student, came in on Sundays to help because the project never stopped running. My lab mates pitched in on different days because the workload was far more than we had ever predicted. Outside the lab, my church friends and family constantly checked in, sending texts of encouragement when I was too exhausted or discouraged to see progress myself.

Together, we adapted.

We changed systems, adjusted protocols and rethought what success looked like in real time. We changed the protocols altogether. Soon, what we were doing was not at all what the original protocol said to do. Those pivots did not weaken the project. In fact, they yielded more data than I had originally expected.

One of the most frustrating moments came after we had finished all of the time-sensitive data collection, when I needed to dissect moths to measure spermatophores. Every paper I read simply stated that dissections were performed, but none explained how. With guidance from Charles, his advisor, my advisor, undergraduate intern input

and a lot of trial and error, we eventually figured it out. We are even planning on writing a short paper on how to do this so future researchers don’t have the same struggles as we did. It was a small methodological detail in the literature, but a major hurdle in practice.

This project taught me that setbacks do not equal failure. Just because something was not planned does not mean it is bad. What I set out to do does not look exactly like what I ended up doing, but I still tested my hypotheses and answered my questions. I just did it along a path I never could have predicted.

Perseverance, I have learned, is not about forcing things to work. It is about adapting, trusting yourself and leaning on the people willing to walk through the hard parts with you. You can do incredibly difficult things, especially when you do not do them alone.

Let me be clear, I had a ton of help with my project. I am extremely grateful to my lab mates, research stations, field technicians, interns, collaborators, my committee and my advisor. This project was a massive undertaking, and it truly would not have been possible without their support, patience

and willingness to help when things did not go as planned.

I also want to thank my sponsors, Cotton Incorporated and the FFAR Fellows Program, as well as my advisor, Dominic Reisig, for their support. The Fellows Program has given me opportunities to expand my community and think more intentionally about how I communicate my project and its findings.