{"id":429873,"date":"2026-09-08T20:00:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T20:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/429873\/"},"modified":"2026-09-08T20:00:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T20:00:15","slug":"meet-iris-schmeder-undergraduate-frog-researcher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/429873\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet Iris Schmeder, Undergraduate Frog Researcher"},"content":{"rendered":"

Iris Schmeder is a senior biology major who researches the biodiversity and ecology of frogs in\u00a0the lab of professor Kelly Zamudio<\/a> at The University of Texas at Austin. She\u2019s also a Dean\u2019s Scholar and a former Stengl-Wyer Biodiversity Scholar who participated in the Freshman Research Initiative.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We caught up with her recently to find out about her time at UT and her plans for the future. This conversation was edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n

Why did you choose UT and how did you end up researching frogs?\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of the main reasons I chose UT was because of the Dean\u2019s Scholars Honors Program and the community and the culture that they had built. It just sounded amazing. I was really interested in research, but I didn\u2019t really know how to do it, and so that\u2019s what really drew me to UT.\u00a0<\/p>\n

During my first week of school, I went to this grad student seminar and I ran into a professor in the hallway and he asked me what I was interested in. And I said, \u201cWell, I just got here, and I like biology, but I don\u2019t really know what I want to do within that. I think animals are cool.\u201d He said, \u201cWell would you ever work with frogs?\u201d And I said, \u201cYes, frogs are so cool.\u201d And he said, \u201cYou should talk to my wife.\u201d<\/p>\n

I ended up joining his wife, Kelly Zamudio\u2019s lab and I\u2019m still in it.<\/p>\n

What kind of research have you done with frogs?<\/p>\n

In the summer of 2025, I did my first frog field work with one of Kelly\u2019s grad students, a different principal investigator, and my best friend, who was an undergrad in Kelly\u2019s lab at the time. The four of us went to Hawaii for a couple weeks to catch coqui frogs, and that was so much fun.<\/p>\n

We were studying the invasive coqui frogs and how they have adapted to inhabit a large elevational gradient on the island. To find the frogs, we would go out to the forest at sunset when they became active, split up to cover more ground, and follow a call and scan the trees, ground, branches, leaves and sticks with headlamps until we found the one that was calling. Then we just grabbed it quickly and put it into a plastic bag until we all met up back at the car, transferred them to containers, and then processed them at the end of the night back at the Airbnb. We usually hit 3 field sites a night, driving to different elevations and areas of the island. Some sites were more difficult than others. There was one site that was so dense that Madeline (the other undergrad) and I had to army crawl on the ground and spiderman crawl up trees to maneuver through the forest and track down the frogs. It also rained almost every night, if not every night.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Iris Schmeder is a senior biology major who researches the biodiversity and ecology of frogs in\u00a0the lab of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":429874,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133],"class_list":["post-429873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=429873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429873\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/429874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=429873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=429873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=429873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}