STATE COLLEGE — While other college students may be thinking about working on their tans, Maya Evanitsky this summer is sequencing the genetic material of an extinct, predatory cat.

The Cranberry Township native and Penn State University senior has been working for months on a project focused on the university’s already-extinct namesake: The Nittany Lion, known properly as the Eastern Mountain Lion.

Evanitsky, a student at Penn State’s Shreyer Honors College, took a cutting from the school’s original, taxidermy lion display in April, and has been working to get samples from other preserved lions across the state.

The point, she said, is to build a library of data she can use to compare with still-existing populations of mountain lions.

Evanitsky hopes the project will raise awareness of conservation efforts focused on the big cats.

With more data on the cats’ DNA, she said, researchers can examine how different populations change over time, and even explore the reason or reasons they went extinct.

“This kind of data is really valuable in helping preserve closely related species that are still endangered,” Evanitsky said.

The push to broaden awareness started even before Evanitsky took her cut from the original Nittany Lion. She and biology professor George Perry started an online campaign to fund the research.

Evanitsky said the effort raised $12,175. Most of that will go to lab costs associated with processing the lion’s DNA — something Perry said would not be possible without “massively parallel sequencing,” a technology he said has revolutionized research on ancient genetic material.

The university’s stuffed lion isn’t exactly ancient. It was shot and preserved in 1855. But chemical treatments used to preserve its skin made DNA sampling impossible previously. Researchers tried and failed to obtain a genetic sample from the lion in 1998.

There’s no guarantee that Evanitsky’s attempt will be more successful, but it’s much more likely today than it was 13 years ago, Perry said.

“With ancient DNA, the quantities of DNA that comes from the animal are often so limited that we are really looking for a needle in a haystack,” he said. “We are now able to sequence lots and lots and lots of haystacks.”

Crowd funding was another way to push awareness about Evanitsky’s work and mountain lion conservation in general.

“I think the best opportunity is when there is a large, interested community, like we have for this project with the Penn State alumni,” Perry said.

A small portion of the donations also are going to help Evanitsky afford summer housing at the university, where laboratories are processing the DNA samples she has collected.

Evanitsky’s father, Mitch, who owns a Cranberry Township catering business and graduated from Penn State with a degree in social work, said his daughter’s project has probably attracted more attention from media than anything else.

But it’s also managed to reach people as far away as the Netherlands, he said, where one man is pushing Maya to apply for a Fulbright Scholarship after her graduation next year.

Evanitsky’s mother, Barbara, and older brother, Zach, are also Penn State graduates.

The project has pushed the often shy Evanitsky to be more comfortable with presenting information to large groups, Mitch said.

“She’s a lot brighter and a lot more geared toward school than I was,” Mitch said. “It’s a great project to move her further along to where she needs to be.”

Evanitsky said the task of collecting samples from other preserved Eastern Mountain Lions has grown to include specimens from the state museum in Harrisburg, Albright College, and a museum in Williamsport, Pa.

“I’m trying to basically get as many mountain lion individuals as possible,” she said.

The DNA sequence from the university’s original Nittany Lion isn’t as big as some others, she said, and includes about 17,000 base pairs in its mitochondrial cells.

Lab analysis of that sample should be done by the end of August, when Evanitsky will begin her own analysis and write her thesis, which will be put online next spring.

Evanitsky said she didn’t always want to be a scientist, and in high school was interested in writing until a 10th grade chemistry class piqued her interest.

From there, she said, forensic science became a pursuit and she enrolled at Penn State, where she broadened her approach to biochemistry in her sophomore year and began working with Perry.

The professor, who is spending his summer doing field work in Madagascar, said Evanitsky has been preparing for the project for years by learning both ancient DNA lab methods and “bioinformatics.”

“Both of these skill sets are unusual for an undergraduate student researcher,” he said.