Tim Colston has collected animals, including butterflies, frogs and snakes, since he was a child.

OXFORD, Miss. – Animals have always fascinated Tim Colston, a doctoral student in biology at the University of Mississippi. As a child, he set up a large screened tent and filled it with butterflies and potted flowers to see which plants they would visit most often.

Later, while watching and waiting for toad eggs to hatch, he discovered a garter snake with a full belly, instead of the eggs. With Jake the garter snake as a childhood roommate, Colston, of Oklahoma City, was paving a path to study herpetology.

His lifelong efforts have paid off with a 2012-13 Fulbright Scholarship, and his Fulbright project will take him to Ethiopia for the next eight months, where he will be affiliated with Abebe Getahun of Addis Ababa University. Using DNA and other new technologies, he intends to promote conservation awareness of Ethiopia’s unique, diverse and highly endemic reptile fauna by investigating how geology, geography, changing climate and other factors have influenced the structure of those reptile communities.

He hopes to fill a critical gap by contributing significant knowledge about reptile diversity and by providing novel or more efficient analytical approaches to the field.Read the story …