The Garden Club of America offers a 27 different merit based scholarships, fellowships and awards every year to scores of students in areas such as horticulture, botany, conservation, urban forestry, garden history design, coastal wetlands, and pollinator research.
Ian Medeiros
Four College of the Atlantic students are proud to be included in this year’s awards.
Ian Medeiros
Ian Medeiros ’16 is the 2015 winner of the The Joan K. Hunt and Rachel M. Hunt Summer Scholarship in Field Botany. Medeiros began work this summer surveying the plants and lichens found on outcrops of serpentine bedrock in western Massachusetts. Serpentine is a unique rock that often produces soils which are chemically stressful for plants. It has been studied extensively in California and moderately in Maine and Vermont. However, there are no published biological studies of serpentine outcrops in Massachusetts. This research project will be used as part of Medeiros’ senior project.
Liam Torrey ’17
Liam Torrey
Liam Torrey ’17 is the 2015 winner of The Zeller Summer Scholarship in Medicinal Botany. He is especially interested in how plants express chemicals and whether this expression is impacted by the ecology of where these plants grow. His research project entitled, “Do Differences in Environment Yield Changes in Phytochemical Expression in Melissa officinalis?” explores variations in the plant chemistry of lemon balm when it is grown under a number of environmental variables.
Ella Samuel ’16
Ella Samuel
Ella Samuel ’16 is a winner of The Garden Club of America Awards for Summer Environmental Studies. She is researching the use of oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus) to modify contaminated soil at the polluted Callahan Mine site in Brooksville. Her study explores safe and efficient options for cleaning and replacing the soil to aid in ecosystem recovery.
Bik Wheeler
Bik Wheeler
Bik D. R. Wheeler is a winner of The Frances M. Peacock Scholarship for Native Bird Habitat. Wheeler is a Master’s candidate at College of the Atlantic. His thesis project is entitled “Spruce wood-warbler use of forest structure: Revisiting Robert MacArthur’s study of niche partitioning.” In the mid 1950’s Robert MacArthur conducted the seminal research on warbler niche partitioning, similar species of warblers coexisting through specialization in their foraging areas. Wheeler is repeating this ecological study at the original location, in Acadia National Park, to reexamine the theory, with modern research methods, after 60 years of environmental change
