My name is Sam Gochman and I am a senior at Half Hollow Hills High School West. I came to the Dávalos Lab with an interest in biology having previously researched the camouflage, behavior, and evolution of cuttlefish and katydids. I was looking for an opportunity to gain experience in a lab setting and research a topic I enjoy learning about. In the past, phylogenetics assumed that traits of animals are independent of one another. I am currently analyzing and transforming bat dental data to look for dependency among their traits to see if these methods can be used. This will hopefully contribute to more accurate phylogenies that avoid dependency and therefore redundancy. As a result of this project I will gain experience in database handling and merging, bioinformatics for phylogenetics and evolutionary models, and data analysis using R. I hope that my results will improve the way phylogenies are generated and used. The experience of working on a research team and the skills I have learned will be instrumental in my future endeavors.