Undergraduate research leads Ashley Gambrell ’25 to the Florida Keys and beyond

Veterinarian science led Ashley Gambrell to Clemson. But instead of animals, she discovered a love of adventure and oceanic exploration. Next stop in her research journey: South Africa.

Ashley Gambrell grew up in Blythewood, South Carolina, in a house full of garnet and black.

"My whole family are USC alumni," she says. "Like, everybody: My mom, my dad, my brother, my cousins - all USC alumni."

Of course, she was drawn to USC, but it didn't quite have what she was looking for, namely a solid veterinary program. So, she set her sights west, to Clemson, by way of Tri-County Tech and the Bridge to Clemson Program.

Aiming for veterinary school

"I originally wanted to be a veterinarian, so I wanted to go to Clemson because they have a good animal and veterinary sciences program," says Gambrell. The summer after her freshman year, she interned at a veterinary clinic in Columbia, South Carolina and quickly realized she was on the wrong trajectory.

"I was miserable," she recalls. "It just wasn't for me. So I was like, great, I came all this way to Clemson. I'm like three hours from home. What do I do now?"

She briefly considered dropping out and applying to USC, but she had acquired a treasured group of friends in her first year, and she loved how close the main campus was to the forests and mountains of the Upstate.

"You can drive 30 minutes to a mall in Anderson one way, or you can drive 40 minutes the other way and go hiking where there's no cell service," she says. "It's just a good area."

Changing course at Clemson

She decided to stay, and the next semester, she got into a vertebrate biology class that changed her life. She switched majors to biological science and never looked back.

Another pivotal moment came when she joined Clemson's undergraduate research program, Creative Inquiry (CI), as part of a project called "Something Very Fishy" that taught elementary school students about the ocean. She spent a semester teaching kids about things like coral and sea turtles and realized she was passionate about it. She decided to get Scuba certified and spent a summer participating in another CI in the Florida Keys that researched the conservation of marine resources.

Thriving through Creative Inquiry

"I basically spent a month digging trash out of the ocean for a Ph.D. student," she laughs. "We were studying how trash is impacting invertebrates. I loved it."

Gambrell participated in CI projects for four semesters and says she couldn't recommend the experience highly enough to other students. She would encourage them to be proactive and not expect things to fall into their laps.

"Before Clemson, I didn't get involved in all this kind of stuff," she says. "Then I started researching what CI is and all the different research opportunities it offers, and I started reaching out. That's all it took. If you actually want to do something, you have to go out of your way. We're adults. Clemson is not going to just throw it at you."

Researching in the Florida Keys and South Africa

Gambrell has been accepted into yet another CI program and will return to the Florida Keys this summer to spend four to six weeks researching the heatwave impacts on marine herbivores, a project she developed herself.

"It was an idea I had when I was in the Keys last summer," she says. "I'll be going down with our research lab, and we'll be staying in an Airbnb and I'll be diving pretty much every day off our boat."

She's also signed up for a study abroad program in South Africa, where she'll help research mammalian ecology for two and a half weeks at the end of the summer.

"I want to do adventurous things and go out of my comfort zone," she says. "Once I experienced research in CI and all these things that Clemson has to offer, I was like, why not enjoy these years?"

Gambrell is on track to add a little Clemson orange to her family in May 2025, when she'll graduate with a bachelor's degree in biological science with a minor in chemistry. Her dream is to become a marine ecology professor.

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