Fellowship Experiences

We had been driving for about four hours down the Atlantic coast, across fields and under wide skies, when we finally pulled off the road to a little café called Newsome’s Restaurant in Burgess, Virginia.  Read more...

Wild celery, a type of seagrass, can provide clues to how human activities have affected and changed the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem over long spans of time. Finding old samples for DNA analysis sent this graduate fellow on a scientific treasure hunt.

I am not sleeping well, constantly stabbed by old corn stubble as I roll from side to side in my tent. Finally, first light comes around 6 a.m. on an early September morning. I unzip my tent, stick my head out, and stare out into the soybean abyss. Welcome to a farm field that is the field laboratory for my research project.

I learned about a story-telling method called “And, But, Therefore” that helped me explain my scientific work well. Then I helped apply this approach — at a NOAA workshop attended by the agency’s leaders.

“Do you mind if we check your rain gutters for mosquitoes?” was a phrase that my field crew and I used a lot this summer. Our research took us door to door in the Petworth neighborhood in the District of Columbia and in Bladensburg and Columbia in Maryland. We wanted to ask residents what they knew about controlling mosquitoes in their yards.