After completing his BSc at Truman State University in 2014 and a research internship at the St. Louis zoo in 2015, Patrick took some time off of biology to teach English in China. Now he is happily an MSc student working on his thesis in the SpecIAnt group, where he is co-supervised by Pierre Nouhaud and Jonna Kulmuni. The project will be examining the role of Transposable Elements (TEs) in the hybridization of two wood ant species using genomic data. He hopes to begin describing the process through which TEs spread in hybrid genomes in non-model species.