HOUR (The Hopkins Office for Undergraduate Research) is honored to share the extraordinary undergraduate students majoring in Behavioral Biology who are part of the AY26 PURA Cohort.

PURA is the Provost’s Undergraduate Research Award. Provost Joseph Cooper (1991-1995) established the PURA program in 1993 with a generous endowment by the Hodson Trust. The program was created to support and encourage Hopkins undergraduate students to engage in independent research, scholarly and creative projects.

We look forward to seeing the outcomes of their projects and hope you join us in celebrating their accomplishments! Note, all recipients are required to present their project at an upcoming DREAMS event (either Spring 2026 or Spring 2027). We hope you will also join us then and learn more about their work!

Sofia Carlo, Class of 2026

The study for my PURA Grant project intends to test solidity expectations in dogs. Research has shown that infants have an innate understanding of basic solidity principles (i.e. solid objects cannot pass through solid walls). Our own research will examine if dogs, too, have this instinctual solidity expectation. Whether dogs seek explanations for violations of this expectation, and if dogs are capable of updating their mental explanations if new information is made available to them. Would this new information abolish their curiosity in the object? 

Estella Cui, Class of 2028

This summer, my research will investigate how sexual conflict and multilevel selection shape behavior in populations of water striders (Aquarius remigis) in the wild by studying the effects of male mating aggression on female dispersal and reproductive fitness in a natural stream environment. Using novel methods—including individually marking insects with enamel paint and tracking their movements via drone surveillance—the study will measure male aggression levels and observe how females conditionally disperse away from aggressive males. By replicating and extending prior laboratory findings in a natural, unconstrained setting, the project aims to determine whether the balancing selection observed in lab studies (where aggressive males have individual fitness advantages but reduce group-level fitness) also occurs in the wild. The innovative tracking methods will also establish a foundation for future water strider studies hoping to use remote sensing technologies.

Irene Park, Class of 2028

Mental time travel (MTT) is the ability of a subject to create mental simulations of the past and future and utilize this information for decision-making. It was originally thought that humans were the only organisms capable of MTT, but prior research on episodic foresight in scrub jays suggests otherwise. Animals with high-level cognition, such as corvids and apes, may be more likely to exhibit MTT. Echolocating bats exist in complex fission-fusion societies and rely heavily on interpreting the timing of their calls and echoes to navigate through their environments and acquire food successfully. This study evaluates the ability of the trainable, echolocating big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus) to perform one of the core elements of MTT: time perception (TP). Bats will be trained to navigate a T-maze to find a food reward—the position of which is determined by the duration of an auditory cue played in a waiting chamber. I hypothesize that if the big brown bat is capable of time perception, then the bat subjects will demonstrate significantly high rates of success in locating food rewards after several trials. This experiment aims to determine whether echolocating bats can perceive time differences and serve as the first step in a series of similar experiments to uncover how factors, such as social learning, stimulus type, and task complexity, influence performance. These findings could reshape our understanding of the potential for MTT in nonhuman animals and its role in cognitive evolution.