My name is Zachary Rowe and I am a student at Smithtown High School East. I wanted to work in the Dávalos lab during the summer of my junior year in order to experience hands on university research. I am currently researching the evolutionary relationship between the plant eating habits of certain mammals and the differences in the genes of the mitochondrial genome. Using known phylogenies, I hope to establish a parallel between the changes in the diets of over 50 mammals and corresponding changes in their genes. I will be using a variety of programs and techniques, from statistical analysis with R, to working in the shell, to generating genetic alignments. With this project, I hope to gain valuable science, statistic, and computer science skills that I can use for the rest of my life.