DANBURY, CONN. — Brookfield resident Mark Fitzgerald has been named the recipient of the 2010 Provost Prize honoring outstanding research conducted by an undergraduate student at Western Connecticut State University.

Fitzgerald, a biology major in his senior year at WestConn, received the award for his project presentation during the sixth annual WestConn Research Day on May 13.

The prize, funded by the WCSU Office of the Provost and presented by Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Dr. Linda Rinker, will provide $1,000 toward expenses for Fitzgerald’s presentation of an original research study at a professional conference during the 2010-11 academic year.

Fitzgerald coauthored the research project with Brookfield resident Mary Alice Secola, a graduate student in biological and environmental sciences, under the guidance of WCSU Associate Professor of Biological and Environmental Sciences Dr. Edwin Wong. Fitzgerald and Secola performed analyses of the genomes of microbial communities collected from sediment in exposed and submerged shoreline areas of Candlewood Lake.

In their abstract for the research project, Fitzgerald and Secola hypothesized that the biennial implementation of winter drawdowns of the water level of Candlewood Lake — in part to control Eurasian watermilfoil, a pest weed whose spread can impair recreational use of the lake — also may have unintended effects on microbial communities along the shoreline. To study whether this occurs, the researchers compared genomes found in the microbe samples collected from shoreline sediment exposed during a lake drawdown with genomes from microbes collected from lakebed regions that remained submerged during the drawdown. Their analysis utilized molecular biological research tools to sequence and fingerprint DNA samples and run search-engine comparisons through DNA databases to determine whether microbial communities in exposed and submerged shoreline regions revealed significant differences.

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