4 Students Earn Graduate Research Awards; New Award Apps Due May 1

In fall 2020, four graduate students were selected to receive the first-ever Graduate Research Awards in the Harvard Forest Long-Term Ecological Research Program. The awardees were selected based on the quality of their research proposals, and the potential of their projects to leverage existing HF LTER research and create new LTER collaborations.

Each student presented the results of their work in the March 2021 LTER Symposium.

• Thomas Muratore, a PhD student in the Frey Lab at the University of New Hampshire, investigated the mediators of soil carbon stocks by comparing the carbon "fingerprints" of incubated soil samples and examining roots and fungal hyphae.
• Sophie Everbach, a PhD student in the Holbrook Lab at Harvard University, explored the selective decline of eastern hemlocks due to hemlock woolly adelgid, by studying root resource allocation across hemlock age and adelgid infestation severity metrics.
• Amanda Suzzi, a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts, worked with educators in the Harvard Forest LTER Schoolyard Ecology (K12) Program to develop diversity, equity, and inclusion resources for teacher-developed STEM lesson plans.
• Nikhil Chari, a PhD student in the Taylor Lab at Harvard University, studied soil cores from an experimentally warmed forest study area to examine the impacts of roots on soil organic matter formation and loss.

Contact LTER graduate student site representative Luca Morreale (lmorreal@bu.edu) or LTER PI Jonathan Thompson for more details or with any questions.