Heather Liwanag, more or so known as Dr. Liwanag wasn’t always a professor and researcher, at one point she was a young girl who was a very serious student but found time to go to the beach because it was something she enjoyed. Heather, grew up in the sunny city of Granada Hills, California. She had always had an interest in animals and had thought about being a veterinarian but she didn’t really know what to do with it. Interacting with animals in the wild was something she had always wanted to do and with the great idea from her high school chemistry teacher she had then thought about becoming a professor. It was the job for her when she learned that she could research while teaching other people as well, who wouldn’t want a job like that?
Mr. Bradish, the chemistry teacher that gave her the idea of becoming a college professor was her motivation for her success today. Heather later went to college and volunteered for different scientists to get a feel for the lab work and field work to make sure it was something she really wanted to do. She worked in a lab studying damselfish, and another lab studying copepods and sea urchins. When the opportunity came she went to Mexico to go on a field research trip to study fish communication and that’s when she knew this was her calling! It wasn’t till though that in graduate school that she worked with mammals, but by then she was hooked on the science! Dr. Liwanag says it’s very important to try new things and make sure you like doing them or you could end up not really doing what your passionate about. As she dives deeper into her field, she is constantly learning new things! More than once she has found that her hypothesis or prediction was not correct, but she explains it as even more interesting because it means that she’s just learning more that she didn’t know before. At one time she compared fur to blubber for her PhD thesis, and she thought that the blubber would be better insulator, however she was wrong and it made her think about why marine mammals have evolved to use blubber multiple times. She found through experiments that blubber looks to evolved because of the physics of diving and swimming, not because it’s a better insulator. Some current projects that's shes’s working on in her lab include: development of thermoregulation and diving in Weddell seal pups, population monitoring of northern elephant seals at our local rookery, effects of super cooling on Italian Wall Lizards, thermal adaptations of Mediterranean House Geckos in different climates, and characteristics of feathers associated with aquatic adaptation in birds. As you can see she has a lot of projects in her lab that she constantly doing! When she’s doing her normal day-to-day routines every day isn’t always the same because of her research time and the teaching time she does! Her typical teaching day will include teaching the classroom or/and the lab, answering e-mails, and holding office hours for students to come ask her questions about the work in class or to work on projects. Her research is not, however, a everyday thing so when she does get to do it, she really enjoys spending time in the lab collecting data. Her favorite thing is field work-especially with animals! Her field work days consist of long days and early mornings, packing as much work with the animals as possible, and making sure to eat some dinner before going to bed and doing the whole routine all over again! Dr. Liwanag does have a life outside of her passion to work. She has a family with her husband and two kids, plus her third child (not human) the family dog! As she said she loves to work with animals- seals and lizards- and getting to be outdoors a lot, including the beach and hiking. Heather plans to continue teaching and her passion for animals through research labs and classes at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo College. Her relentlessness for her work never stops but she enjoys the life outside of the college with doing more things she loves.
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December 2018
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