UWM's Finest Lab Rats!

Nigel Rothfels

 

We all know him and love him, especially his lovely talks about animal mating videos, but how well do we really know Nigel Rothfels?

Outside of our Lab Rats class, Nigel Rothfels is the director of the Office of Undergraduate Research here at UWM. Like he told us before during our LLC luncheon at Panther Welcome Day, he did his undergrad at the University of Utah and he received his Ph.D. in History from Harvard University. He also had his post-doctoral research fellowship from the Princeton University, the Australian National University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He started at UWM in 1994 as the Assistant Director of the Center for Twentieth (now Twenty-first) Centry Studies and the Director of Edison Initiative in the College of Letters and Science. In 2007, he became UWM's Director of the Office of Undergraduate Research, and of course our awesome Lab Rats LLC instructor.

Some of Nigel's most popular work includes his book, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (2002), which has a great review in the New York Times! He is also the editor of a cross-disciplinary collection of essays called Representing Animals (2002). In his more current research, he focused on elephants since the eighteenth century and how our ideas about elephants have changed over the last centuries. He also has worked on the history of butterfly collection in German, New Guinea at the end of the nineteenth century.

Fun facts about Nigel: he has a website (Nigel's Website link), he owns a kayak, and he went to Germany.

Kyla Esguerra

Kyla Esguerra is another lovely lady that Lab Rats should know. She's usually the instructor for the LLC class, but she recently had a beautiful baby boy named Elliot William.

A little about Kyla is that she finished her undergrad from Hope College in Holland, MI with English and Psychology degrees and completed her English Master's at University of Notre Dame. Before she came the Associate Director of the Office of Undergraduate Research at UWM, she was she is a Lecturer in the English department, an Instructional Specialist with the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP), and the UROP coordinator. She has been named a UWM Center Scholar by the Center for Instructional and Professional Development twice! She is currently researching student learning within a paired-course learning community environment and effective use of sample papers in the classroom.

Fun facts about Kyla: She loves cooking, spending time with her family, she has two cats (Furious and Alastair), and her husband is in a band I'm Not A Pilot.