Magazine lauds student’s work with ‘slimy things’

Kelly Dorgan doesn’t much like Jell-O, she eats it only when sick. Still, the University of Maine graduate student buys gelatin in 25-pound boxes, because it is a key component of her worm research. Gelatin happens to have properties similar to marine mud, with one distinct improvement – it is clear.

Dorgan’s gelatin-enabled observation that Nereis virens, burrowing worms commonly known as clam worms or sandworms, move by cracking the marine mud, rather than deforming it, and using their bodies to pry the crack open, was the basis of a 2005 paper published in the journal Nature. Her work earned her a recent write-up in Popular Science as one of its Brilliant 10 scientists. (The magazine dubbed her the “Worm Whisperer.”)

Dorgan has always been interested in science and biology. As a high school student in Hampton, Va., she interned at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. In 2000, while an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Dorgan interned with professor Pete Jumars at the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center. Now she is a doctoral candidate in oceanography, studying with Jumars. All along, Dorgan has been focused on worms.

“I guess I’ve always been more interested in worms and slugs and slimy things,” says Dorgan. “Worms are challenging because they are in this opaque material. Because of that, there are some pretty major questions that haven’t been answered.”

Next, Dorgan wants to use fracture mechanics principles, and a device that looks like a high-tech balloon inflater, to look more closely at the mechanics of worm motion, trying to relate what they are doing in the gelatin to what they are doing in actual mud.

Advice for young scientists? “I’ve used a lot more math than I ever thought I would,” says Dorgan. She enjoys this part of her work, too. If you need math to solve a real-life problem, Dorgan says, “all of a sudden, it becomes more interesting.”