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When Kelly Ng ’26, a biology major from Perth, Australia, joined the Provost’s Student-Faculty Undergraduate Research and Creative Inquiry program, she was looking to grow as a scientist and dive deeper into the kind of hands-on, curiosity-driven work that goes far beyond the walls of the classroom.

“I applied because it offered me an opportunity to grow my skills as a researcher through its provided resources and academic community,” she explained. “I was interested in joining a network of students and faculty engaged in independent research, where I could learn from others’ experiences in research while developing my own.”

“Bat flight research is important in its own right, but being able to use it as a means toward connecting with my students and giving them real ownership over part of their education has got to be one of my favorite parts of being a professor.”

With the mentorship of David Boerma, PhD, assistant professor of Biology at Pace and a Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History, Kelly found herself working on a deceptively simple question: how do bones evolve to meet the needs of how we move? It’s a question that spans biology, anatomy, biomechanics—and in this case, flight.

Together, they are investigating limb structure in the Egyptian fruit bat, a large mammal with a 20+ inch wingspan whose anatomy offers a unique counterpoint to humans. While humans rely on repetitive use of our legs to walk and run, bats rely on their forelimbs (wings) for flight—a repetitive motion in a different part of the body. Do bats show the same pattern of limb function and bone structure that humans do, just flipped?

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“Working with Dr. Boerma, I’m creating 3D structures of leg bones in Egyptian fruit bats to understand how their structure is affected by their function,” said Kelly. “In humans, our legs have less variability because they’re mainly used for walking, while our arms show more variability since we use them for a range of different tasks. We’re studying Egyptian fruit bats to see if this pattern is the same in bats but for the opposite limbs.”

“If a certain kind of animal has evolved to move a certain part of its skeleton in the same way, over and over again throughout its life (e.g., how your legs move to walk), then because those bones experience repetitive forces, they should end up having extremely consistent shapes across all the individuals of that kind of animal,” Professor Boerma explained. “We’re asking, ‘this idea sounds logical, but is it really true?’”

“Being able to see and segment the structures myself made it easier to grasp how limb shape relates to movement,” Kelly said. “It helped me understand those concepts more clearly than I could through lectures or textbooks alone.”

For Kelly, the work has been both technical and transformative. A typical day includes loading CT scans of bat specimens into 3D Slicer software, carefully segmenting bones like the femur, tibia, and pelvis, and cleaning digital models to prepare them for analysis. While the learning curve was steep—“the process of segmenting my first bat took a lot of troubleshooting,” she recalled—the experience pushed her technical skills and built confidence.

“Being able to see and segment the structures myself made it easier to grasp how limb shape relates to movement,” Kelly said. “It helped me understand those concepts more clearly than I could through lectures or textbooks alone.”

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For Boerma, mentoring students like Kelly is one of the most meaningful parts of his work.

“Bat flight research is important in its own right, but being able to use it as a means toward connecting with my students and giving them real ownership over part of their education has got to be one of my favorite parts of being a professor.”

He speaks of Kelly’s early commitment to the project with awe:

“I gave her a 60-page master’s thesis from one of our collaborators to read…and she could talk about it with me like a collaborator herself, all before even beginning the project. I can’t find the words to express to you how much fun that kind of interaction with a student is for a professor.”

Beyond bats, biomechanics, or bone variation, this kind of faculty-student partnership is what the Provost’s program is all about. “Asking for help is an important part of research,” Kelly said. “Being open and honest about what you don’t know does not mean you’re less capable—it’s an important step in the learning process.”

As their research moves into the analysis phase—potentially laying the groundwork for medical insights into human injury risk or the evolution of vertebrate anatomy—Boerma sees something more fundamental taking shape.

“Kelly is growing into the kind of student whose work is now more than just a synthesis of what she reads in a textbook; it’s the kind of thing that could become part of a textbook in the future.”