Profile

• Time Zone

  Eastern

  
  
• Organization

  University of Connecticut

  
  
• Role

  Scientist Mentor: I will mentor teams of students online

  
  
• Research Interests (300 words)

  Understanding ecological and evolutionary mechanisms structuring patterns of plant biodiversity, especially in diverse ecosystems such as the tropics and the Cape Floristic Region in South Africa.

  
  
• Profile Question 1

  What is best about being a scientist?

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

  Being able to wake up every day, knowing that your job is to ask interesting questions about the world, and try to figure out how to best answer them, and then getting to share your discoveries with others.

  
  
• Profile Question 2

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

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

  I decided to follow a career in science after spending 10 weeks working in a diverse tropical rainforest in Costa Rica while an undergraduate. I fell in love with plants, ecology, and became obsessed with trying to figure out where so many species came from, how they managed to co-exist, and why places differed so much with respect to the number of species they harbored. It was during this trip that I also met with graduate students, and learned about PhD programs in ecology and evolutionary biology. I was so excited to learn that I could pursue research as a career.

  
  
• Profile Question 3

  What is tough about being a scientist?

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

  Very early on, you learn that your experiments and studies rarely go to plan. Often, the experiment or study completely fails, or the results you get don't make any sense with respect to your original expectations. This can be disheartening, and frustrating at times, especially when you are very keen to learn the answer to your question, but also can present new opportunities. A lot about science, and doing research, is being able to respond to this situations, and learn from them. When you have that in mind, it can actually be quite fun and exciting to challenge yourself to pursue different avenues of answering your question, or even recognizing that the results from your "failed" study presented new questions to follow.

  
  
• Help represent the outreach efforts of your societies. Please click all those organizations you are a member of:

  (not set)

  
  
• Availability

  I am currently available for mentoring, please send me team match invitations

  
  
• In addition to English, I am comfortable communicating with students in the following languages:

  (not set)

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

  2

  
  

Recent Posts

CHYHS Team 8 Kristen Nolting Mar 29, 2017

said

Hi Everyone! My name is Kristen, and I am one of the team mentors. It looks like I've already missed some exciting science! I totally agree with Hannah - your photos and detailed lab notebooks will be super helpful as you document this…

COM_PROJECTS_MORE

Hi Everyone! My name is Kristen, and I am one of the team mentors. It looks like I've already missed some exciting science! I totally agree with Hannah - your photos and detailed lab notebooks will be super helpful as you document this experiment, and will be a great resource to refer to as you collect the results and try to interpret them.

 

The question of nutrient allocation and leaf size is interesting! A couple of questions: Why do you think that higher nutrient content will correlate with larger leaves? Also, how are you controlling for genotype? Do you have seeds from the same mom? This sounds really exciting! Keep up the good work!

 

~Kristen

WAHSGenetics Group 2 Kristen Nolting Nov 21, 2016

said

Hello Team!

The outline looks good, and it seems like an interesting question you are exploring! Can I ask what your controls are in the experiment? That is, what will be different in your experiment, and what will be the same? Also, you predict…

COM_PROJECTS_MORE

Hello Team!

The outline looks good, and it seems like an interesting question you are exploring! Can I ask what your controls are in the experiment? That is, what will be different in your experiment, and what will be the same? Also, you predict that the treatment with the fertilizer will produce plants with more purple color, but why?! It's an interesting question!

Pre-teens Kristen Nolting Nov 7, 2016

said

Hello Team! It looks like you've had a fun and busy week exploring the power of photosynthesis, great! Your experiment evaluating the role temperature plays in photosynthesis is very interesting, and has big implications as we continue to see…

COM_PROJECTS_MORE

Hello Team! It looks like you've had a fun and busy week exploring the power of photosynthesis, great! Your experiment evaluating the role temperature plays in photosynthesis is very interesting, and has big implications as we continue to see the effects of climate change. I have a question, though. What do you think temperature will do to the photosynthetic machinery? So, why will photosynthesis increase in both the cool and warm environments?

Also, are you going to measure the rate at which the disks rise? So, you can determine a yes-no result - either they rose or they did not. Or you can measure the distance they rise over time, to get a rate. This may be interesting as your treatments may not simply shut down photosynthesis, but could alter the amount of photosynthesis a plant does during a certain amount of time. You could consider plotting this data as a line graph, as well as a bar graph.

Good luck, and I look forward to seeing your results!