More than One Dozen UA Students Earn NSF Fellowships
The National Science Foundation has granted UA students funding for continued and new research projects in areas that include physics, geography, chemistry, ecology and astronomy.

By La Monica Everett-Haynes, University Communications
June 14, 2010


It was the construction of leaves during his hikes in the western region of Idaho that most intrigued Benjamin Blonder.

Blonder, previously a teacher there and now a University of Arizona doctoral student in ecology and evolutionary biology, has received federal funding for a proposal to devise a theory that would help predict important features about plants merely by looking at them.

"I have always been fascinated with the patterns you see in different leaves and always thought they might mean something," said Blonder, whose program includes an emphasis on statistics.

Blonder is among one dozen UA students to receive a fellowship from the National Science Foundation, one that will fund three years of his research at $30,000 for a stipend. The fellowship will cover tuition at $10,000 per year for three years and includes funding for travel. 

Nationally, about 2,000 students received awards through the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program. Also, more than one dozen other UA students received an honorable mention for 2010. 

Laurel Watkins de Jong, another recipient, was encouraged by her supervisor, associate professor or physiology Jean-Marc Fellous, to apply and obliged because "I thought it was a good way to organize myself."

She said it was a "surprise" to learn that she had been awarded. Her grant-funded research will involve a merging behavioral studies and electrophysiology with neuroscience to better understand the neural mechanisms underlying decision-making. 

"We don't understand these mechanism in ourselves, but decision-making underlies our process on a daily basis," said de Jong, who earned her psychology and studio arts degrees from the UA last month. Currently, she is working toward her graduate degree and also working in Fellous' laboratory.

"We are somehow motivated to make decisions, but we don't always stop to say, 'What happens today if I chose this or that?'" Many decisions are made "at a very unnoticeable level," de Jong said. "So it's interesting to understand how our brain encodes these decisions without having a conscious notice of them." 

Among the other UA students and recent graduates to receive the full fellowship are:

  • Timothy Joseph Arnold and Kali Elena Wilson, who are both studying physics and astronomy. Also, Allison Leigh Strom, an Honors College student studying physics and astronomy.
  • Matthew Martin Skroch, a graduate student studying natural resources. 
  • Eric William Schoon, a graduate student studying sociology.
  • Jeffrey Jenkins, an Honors College student in computer science.
  • Sean Paul Howe, an Honors College student who is studying mathematical sciences and geometry.
  • Brent J. Harris, who is studying chemistry.
  • Nhi Duong, a graduate student studing animal behavior and physiology.
  • Jessica De La Ossa and Geoffrey Alan Boyce, who are both studying geography.

During his period of NSF funding, Blonder will collect and record data on hundreds of different species of leaves from trees, bushes, flowering plants, ferns and other greenery. He already has received support from the UA Campus Arboretum. 

Ultimately, he hopes to determine a way to tell by mere sight how much carbon they are gaining, how much nitrogen is necessary to construct the leaf and even how long it will live. 

Blonder will soon begin working at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado. He has already begun measuring leaves – the density, length and frequency of their veins, how many "loops" they contain. 

Implications do exist, said Blonder, who has been working in the laboratory headed up by UA's Brian Enquist, an ecology and evolutionary biology professor. He noted, for instance, that if the theory proves to be accurate, scientists would be able to use it to study well-preserved fossil leaves to make determinations about climates millions of years ago. 

Also, during the 2010-11 year, Blonder will serve as a Science and Society fellow at the Biosphere 2. There, he will be part of a science outreach program and develop permanent displays for tours and exhibits.  

Other students will use their funding and remain at the UA or study elsewhere nationally.

Another fellow, Ahmed Badran, will begin his graduate studies at Harvard University, where he intends to conduct research in the area of direct evolution to investigate the importance of particular interactions in protein-DNA binding and recognition.

Badran, a UA Honors College student who graduated in May, said he was attracted to the fellowship because "you're competing at a national level and schools know this."

For now, he is continuing his research in the lab headed up by Indraneel Ghosh, a UA associate professor of chemistry and also biochemistry and molecular biophysics.

"It was a fantastic opportunity to see if I could compete at the national level," said Badran who begins graduate school in August. "Being in the Ghosh Lab has taught me much in terms of the science and techniques, and this was a great way  to pull it all together."

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Georgia Ehlers

UA Graduate College 

520-621-9103

gehlers@email.arizona.edu