ALEXANDRA BAUER is a M.S. student visiting the FLIES facility to work on her master thesis co-advised by Dr. Jeff Tomberlin. She received her a B.S. in Environmental Monitoring and Analysis from the Dresden University of Applied Sciences in 2016. While analyzing invertebrate remains as part of her Bachelor thesis (“Determination of the diet of released Little Owls (Athene noctua Scopoli, 1769) from the northern Harz foreland”) she became fascinated by insects. She currently pursues her M. S. in Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolution at the University of Göttingen, where she decided to focus her studies on animal morphology and forensic biology, particularly on forensic entomology. Her most notable project was conducted with Dr. Christine Picard at IUPUI, where she worked on annotating and determining genes associated with antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) from blow flies genomes, as well as determining their evolutionary significance in Calliphorids. During her MS research Alex will be investigating the effects of food source moisture on the development of Cochliomyia macellaria.