For the 2nd year in a row, a NRS student wins a NSF graduate fellowship


By RUDI HEMPE
CELS News Editor & Reporter

Fish farming, especially in the southeastern states, is a major industry addressing the increasing demand for more seafood but the process of raising huge amounts of fish in relatively confined areas has its problems.

For the second year in a row, a CELS student has been awarded the coveted Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.

Winning the award, one of the top fellowships in the country, is Josh Atwood, a PhD candidate who works with Dr. Laura Meyerson, an expert on invasives.

Atwood received the news of the award while he was interning at the Bishop Museum in Hawaii under the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT). Stephanie Koch, another Natural Resources Science student, won the award last year.

Atwood had to submit three essays last fall to compete for the fellowship—one on proposed dissertation research, one on a personal statement and one on previous research.

Like his mentor, Atwood is doing research on invasives, studying their competitive abilities. Hawaii, he says, has its share of invasives. One problem is that the native plants are not very capable of competing against invasives. A big problem, he says is Miconia calvescens which is all over the Pacific. It spreads on hillsides and because it is shallow rooted, does not offer much in the way of erosion-prevention.

Atwood, who did his undergraduate work at Bowdoin, has worked in New Zealand and was in the Florida Keys

when he saw Meyerson’s on-line posting for an IGERT position. Now in his second year in IGERT he saw that the Bishop Museum, which has a vast Pacific collection, could use an intern.

His four-month stay there is almost over and despite being in a tropical paradise, he says he still misses New England.

The NSF fellowship starts in the fall and Atwood thinks it should see him through to getting his doctorate in 2011.

Dr. Peter Paton, Chair of the Department of Natural Resource Sciences noted in a message to Dean Jeff Seemann and others at URI, that the fact that URI students have landed the fellowship two years in a row “says a great deal about the current quality of URI students, the strength of the IGERT program and the strong advising from faculty mentors.” The Dean, in reply, stated, “We couldn’t agree more.”

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