Ashish is a first-year grad student in the Phillips lab and is interested in the role microbes play in tree community assembly and how this relationship scales up to influence ecosystem functioning. He’ll spend the next couple of months understanding how mycorrhizal dominance in forests will influence forest-level productivity.

Atalanta is a second-year Ph.D student in the Rosvall lab and NSF Graduate Research Fellow. Her research combines field, molecular, and bioinformatic approaches to investigate behavioral and physiological mechanisms of heat tolerance in wild tree swallows.

Nicole is a Ph.D. candidate in the Phillips Lab studying the regulators and consequences of tree responses to drought. She will use the award to help fund both her fieldwork and lab work this summer. In her spare time, Nicole enjoys coaching the Science Olympiad team at Bloomington High School South.