Souls of SOLS, September 2025

Alice Sansonetti, Biology and Society – Ecology, Ethics, and Economics of the Environment 

Alice Sansonetti was raised by the huckleberry forest in her backyard and the windstorms that blew through Lecce, Italy, each year around her birthday.  

“I grew up very connected to place,” she recounted fondly, “I love my home.” 

Sansonetti spent the hot, Mediterranean summers foraging for wild greens with her grandmother or looking for hermit crabs on the rocky coast with her father, an amateur zoologist who she credits with teaching her to love science and nature. 

Then when she was 13, her mother remarried an American and told Sansonetti that they’d be moving overseas. She was excited at first: “Right after middle school as an Italian child, everyone was like, ‘Woah! You’re going to America!’ It was like, the American dream.”  

“And then I get to America, and me and my mom are in the Lincoln, Nebraska, airport and my mother is like, appalled,” Sansonetti laughed. 

Sansonetti quickly got a crash-course in U.S. culture by attending a Nebraskan summer camp, where she was subjected to confusing experiences like eating cereal for breakfast and “speaking to the American flag.” As she started high school, she settled into life in Nebraska soon enough, embracing fast food chains and trips to the mall.  

The love for nature from her childhood stayed with her, though. She pursued her bachelor’s degree in conservation and ecology at ASU, where she connected with the Center for Biodiversity Outcomes. She continued to work there for her master’s, and then her PhD.  

Now, Sansonetti conducts research with the utilities company Salt River Project (SRP) to determine whether the company's restoration interventions near Flagstaff benefit the local ecosystem. Specifically, the company has been selectively chopping down trees in hopes of creating healthy diversity within the forest, a practice that was common among Indigenous people across the U.S. before they were forcibly displaced by settlers. Sansonetti is helping SRP create models to see if the practice has benefits like creating more habitat for local species or reducing the risks of large wildfires. 

“I was hesitant to work with a corporation at first,” Sansonetti shares, “but also someone needs to give money to restoration projects. They have a lot of data, a lot of resources, and we need a lot of resources.”  

Image

Another part of Sansonetti’s research is simply documenting the process of what it’s like to work with such a large company, in hopes of helping future conservation researchers carry out similar collaborations to protect the natural world in the future. 

Annika Avery – Evolutionary Life Sciences 

While grizzly bears and great white sharks might be deadly apex predators, to humans, they’re not nearly as deadly as a much smaller creature: the mosquito.  

Mosquitos can carry a whole suite of deadly diseases like malaria, dengue, Zika, and west Nile virus, killing one million people across the world every year.  

Mosquitoes are most prevalent in warm, humid places; without moisture, adult mosquitoes can dry out and die. Historically, that meant there weren’t many mosquitoes in the Sonoran Desert. But now, more show up every year.  

“You would think that these mosquitoes wouldn’t be able to survive in the desert, but they're here, and that's because we've modified the environment to be comfortable to us,” explained Annika Avery, “By modifying it for us, we've also modified it for them.” 

Like many other biology lovers, Annika Avery started college thinking she’d pursue medical school. But over time, she realized she wanted a job where she could go outside more, having always been interested in ecology. Then, she read research articles about mosquitoes. 

“I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is the perfect intersection of ecology and public health.’ And then I was pretty passionate about mosquitoes from that point on.”  

Now, Avery investigates the degree to which microclimates –– or little pockets of cooler, moister air –– in Tempe might allow mosquitoes to thrive in our environment. One way Avery has done that is by finding out where mosquitoes thrive on ASU’s Tempe campus, like the basement stairwells or the Social Sciences courtyard, and recording the temperature and humidity of those spots. Those spots tend to be much cooler and wetter than Tempe at large, she’s found.  

Avery has also been exposing mosquitoes to a variety of temperatures and humidity levels in her lab to see how those conditions affect their functioning. So far, it seems like the temperature has a much more immediate effect on the insects than humidity does, though Avery suspects humidity still might help the mosquitos thrive.  

When she’s not working with her mosquitoes, Avery keeps busy with service work. Throughout her PhD, she’s taken on a number of community leadership roles on campus, including working as the co-director of the Insect Research Seminar, a student representative for the Environmental Life Sciences program, and the Graduate Student Government Director of Legislative and Political Action, among other roles. 

“I wanted to be more involved in my community,” Avery said, “and I think I wanted to prove to myself that I could take on some leadership roles.”  

Image

Avery hopes that she can bridge her interest in mosquitoes and public service by helping incorporate the findings from her PhD into public health models that try to predict the risks that mosquitoes pose to Arizonans and find ways to better keep people safe.