News

Please join me in making a gift to the newly created Merit Award Fund for special recognition of graduate students and postdocs who embody the multi-disciplinary commitment to research and mentoring excellence that the VT EPSCoR program has built upon since its inception in Vermont in 1985. Judith Van Houten will match up to the first $2,500 in gifts to help kick off this important fund.

Carol Adair and her colleagues have been studying the potential of tillage and manure application methods to reduce nitrous oxide emissions. They are comparing conventional tilling versus no-till systems, and broadcast versus manure injection.

Post-doctoral Associates Erin Seybold and Jory Hecht and Graduate Research Assistant Brittany Lancellotti joined more than 20,000 other earth and space scientists in new Orleans, Louisiana for the 2017 AGU Fall Meeting, which ran from December 11th through December 15th.

Sarah Coleman, a PhD candidate with Vermont EPSCoR, presented her doctoral dissertation defense on Thursday, January 25, 2018. The defense, "Bottom-Up Adaptive Management and Stakeholder Participation for Clean Water and Healthy Soils in a Complex Social-Ecological System," examined social and ecological factors in mitigating water runoff in the Lake Champlain Basin area.

Sarah was a Graduate Research Associate during the Adaptation to Climate Change in the Lake Champlain Basin (RACC) award NSF EPS 1101317.

BREE Ecological Systems Team researchers took advantage of the recent cold weather to venture out onto the frozen bay and gather samples under ice. The team drilled holes in the ice and drew water samples which will serve a part in BREE research moving forward.

Vermont EPSCoR hosted an aquatic macroinvertebrate identification workshop on December 17, 2017 at St. Michael’s College with high school students from Essex, Winooski, Rice Memorial, Oxbow, and Champlain Valley Union. The workshop trained current high school teams how to pick through and identify macroinvertebrate samples found in their local streams.

The workshop was part of a series of similar opportunities that the Center for Workforce Development and Diversity (CWDD) program offers each year to Vermont high school students led by Dr. Declan McCabe, Professor of Biology at Saint Michael’s College. Several teams will return to St. Michael’s campus to use dissecting microscopes, allowing them a further opportunity to learn about the organisms found in their streams.

Streams project high school team from Bellows Free Academy, which included Fairfax science teacher Tom Lane, junior Lillith Sweet, and senior Malachi Witt attended the American Geophysical Union (AGU) fall meeting in New Orleans, LA.

The week-long conference ran from December 11-15, 2017 and represented the largest Earth and space science meeting in the world. The BFA Fairfax team presented their Vermont EPSCoR research poster, “A View of Water Quality Characteristics Pertinent to Phosphorous Movement in a 2nd Level Tributary to Lake Champlain” at the poster session on December 14th, giving the students a chance to explain and present their findings to interested participants from all over the world. The students also attended a Bright Stars luncheon, which honored middle school and high school students who participated in the conference.

Humans may be the dominant cause of global temperature rise, but they may also be a crucial factor in helping to reduce it, according to a new study that for the first time builds a novel model to measure the effects of behavior on climate.

Drawing from both social psychology and climate science, the new model investigates how human behavioral changes evolve in response to extreme climate events and affect global temperature change.

Vermont EPSCoR CWDD Outreach Coordinator, Veronica Sosa-Gonzalez, PhD, attended major conferences in Fall 2017 as part of an effort to recruit undergraduate interns into research for Basin Resilience to Extreme Events, the current RII Track-1 award. Combining efforts with Tabitha Finch from the Vermont Genetics Network (VGN), the pair attended the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS). Later, Dr. Sosa-Gonzalez attended the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS). The events each had more than 4,000 attendees.

The Vermont EPSCoR Center for Workforce Development and Diversity (CWDD) awarded $55,000 in scholarships to meritorious First Generation and Native American students in 2017. All students are Vermont residents, attending Vermont institutions and pursuing studies in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM).

The Policy and Technical Advisory Committee (PTAC) Fall Meeting was held on November 28, 2017. This served as the second meeting in 2017 for the committee, offering a chance for stakeholders from around the state and region to participate in interactive sessions and discuss the state of the Lake Champlain Basin.

Robinson School students from Puerto Rico Andrea Salellas and Gabriela Handall, along with their teacher mentor Marcel Torres, were selected to travel from June 12-18 to the state of Vermont to take an intensive training in management and water quality at Saint Michael's College in Vermont.

As part of the training, the students attended a conference about lake and stream ecology, environmental policy and management, climate change indicator, water quality indicators and land use management. At the end of the training week, the students designed their research project in which they will be working during from July through February, in order to present the findings on March at the Vermont research symposium.

We are happy to share with you the following funding opportunities and positions offered through Vermont EPSCoR in this Funding Updates issue of our e-newsletter. Please distribute broadly.

Vermont EPSCoR Graduate Research Associates Caitlin Crossett and Maike Holthuijzen together with Livia Donicova and Janel Roberge from the Center for Workforce Development and Diversity (CWDD), traveled to Shelburne Farms in Shelburne Vermont to demonstrate scientific methods to elementary students from area schools during Watershed Day on October 5, 2017.

ST. ALBANS — Vermont PBS screened the second episode of its series Saving Our Waters at the 14th Star Brewing Co. Wednesday evening, followed by a panel discussion and audience questions.

Vermont EPSCoR held a Grant Writing Workshop at Trader Duke's Hotel (formerly the Doubletree) in South Burlington, Vermont on Saturday, November 11, 2017. This day-long workshop provided helpful information and hands-on proposal writing instruction to over 35 graduate research assistants, post-doctoral associates and faculty.

There was no golden dome on the top of the Davis Center, but the fourth floor of the UVM student center bore more than a passing resemblance to the Vermont State House on Monday morning.


Nearly 50 state legislators took up residence there from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., on hand for UVM fifth annual Legislative Summit.

An Indian Land High School teacher and two students visited Vermont in June to do research on water in the Lake Champlain basin and bring their new skills home to put into practice. Dr. Thomas Townsend, Anna Juarez and Nisha Patel visited Burlington, on the east side of Lake Champlain, from June 19-23, along with 19 other groups from high schools in Vermont and Puerto Rico.

A few Thanksgivings ago, my then-ten-year-old daughter and I went for an afternoon stroll. Unseasonably warm weather made for a longer than planned walk through a power line right-of-way and on down through steeply sloping woods to the Winooski River. As we moved through the tall scrub, Lauren's interest was drawn to the golf ball-sized swellings on desiccated goldenrod stalks.

Cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, are found naturally in freshwater in the U.S. and in Lake Champlain and other Vermont waters. Cyanobacteria grow well in water that contains high levels of phosphorous and nitrogen. Cyanobacteria can multiply quickly to form dense blooms, especially during warm days of summer and fall. In recent years, cyanobacteria blooms have occurred most often in northern sections of Lake Champlain, such as St. Albans Bay and Mississquoi Bay, where researchers at the Rubenstein Ecosystem Science Laboratory conduct ongoing studies of lake ecosystem health.