Profile

• Time Zone

  Eastern

  
  
• Organization

  Miami University

  
  
• Role

  Scientist Mentor: I will mentor teams of students online

  
  
• Research Interests (300 words)

  I am interested in the microbes that live in the soil, such as fungi and bacteria, and how they affect the growth of plants. For example, rhizobia bacteria fix nitrogen, a macronutrient all plant require, which increases the growth of the plants that host the bacteria. There is also mycorrhizal fungi, which forage phosphorus, another macronutrient required for plant growth, and trades it for carbon with the associated plant. Most of my research has looked at how we can use these microbes to increase agricultural yield while requiring fewer harmful fertilizers. I am also interested in how these microbes can be used to increase the success of habitat restoration.

  
  
• Profile Question 1

  When and why did you decide to go into a science career?

  
  
• Answer the question you selected for profile question 1 here (300 words):

  I didn't always like science. It wasn’t until my junior year of high school, when I did an internship at a local botanical garden, that I got a glimpse of the miraculous plant world. With the help of the scientists at the garden, I was able to design an experiment where I tested the effect of mycorrhizal fungi on bean plants. What I found was intriguing: while the mycorrhizal fungi did not increase the biomass of the plants, plants with the mycorrhizal fungi had less caterpillar damage than the control. Now, I know that this is a recently described phenomenon called mycorrhizal induced resistance. This experience really opened up the science world to me. It was the first time I discovered that you don’t need fancy lab equipment to do research; you just need the ingenuity and drive.

  
  
• Profile Question 2

  What lessons have you learned in your career about how science works?

  
  
• Answer the question you selected for profile question 2 here (300 words):

  Science can be finicky. You make informed hypotheses based off of what you know about the subject, and sometimes you are right. Sometimes things work out exactly as planned, and you get the exact results you expected and hoped for. Sometimes though, things turn out quite differently.
  
  Sometimes your project crashes and burns and you get nothing from it except that the way you did whatever you did is not going to work. Despite what you might think at the time, the results are valuable and are often drastically unreported in the science world, and these results are just as much science as those that you expected.
  
  And sometimes, the unexpected happens. These are the ground-breaking, earth-shattering moments in science that may happen only once in a scientist’s career.
  
  Being a scientist means that you try to informed enough to predict your results and open to failures, but also ready to take that unexpected result and run with it.

  
  
• Profile Question 3

  Do you have advice for students about preparing for a science career?

  
  
• Answer the question you selected for profile question 3 here (300 words):

  The most important piece of advice for any student looking to pursue a career in science is to find something you are passionate about. Whatever you do, you should be able to eat, drink, and breathe it. Not that you have to make it your life, but good science can't really be done when you have to drag yourself out of bed every morning to do it. The best science is from people who really engage with it, who think about it all the time, who have a personal motivation to answering those questions that have not yet been answered. Whether that be in particle physics to global ecology, passion takes you further in science than any other trait.
  
  You also have to know your field. This is where passion helps, because you have to have the drive to learn more. Study your field deeper than your textbooks currently take you. Seek out the knowledge you don't have. Connect with people in the field you want to go into, so that you can pick their brain when you can't find an answer. Once you discover what you are passionate about, don't just stop there. Understand what about it interests you and what you and the scientific community as a whole needs to know more about. If you can do that, you are already a scientist.

  
  
• Availability

  I am NOT available, please temporarily remove me from the available mentor list

  
  
• Capacity: How many teams at a time are you comfortable working with?

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