team member profiles « The Echinacea Project

Intro

I’m currently attending the University of Vermont (UVM) in Burlington, VT and will be a Junior next year. I am majoring in Environmental Science with a concentration in Water Resources. Burlington is a great little city. It is progressive and there is so much going on for such a little place…well, it is the biggest town in VT. There are so many great restaurants and shops and locally grown/made is a huge thing there!
I am from “Clover Valley” Minnesota. You won’t be able to find that on a map…but it is somewhere in between Duluth and Two Harbors a bit inland from the lake. Lake Superior is awesome and if you haven’t been to the North Shore and the Boundary Waters you definitely should at some point in your life.

Introduction

Hello Echinacea fans!
I’m Christine… and I’m in the Plant Biology and Conservation master’s program at Northwestern University.

Here are some things I saw at the grocery store yesterday:
1. 40 jerky sticks vacuum-sealed together
2. A jerky gun (Fast on the draw, according to to the package)
3. Fireworks

I feel so un-American, not owning any of this.

There Are Animals Among Us…

As the crew posts profiles of themselves, certain aspects of people’s personalities are inevitably left out. Our complex identities are unable to be fully described in a few short paragraphs. In an attempt to fill some of these holes, I present Julie Nicol.

Julie displays her talent.

Who would have known there are such wonderful animal impersonation talents in Team Echinacea. It appears that Jameson can do a killer cat impression too; we’ll work on getting it on camera.

Profile: Rachel Mills

Rachel is a 3rd year master’s student at the University of Minnesota in Ruth Shaw’s lab. Her research is focused on the rapid evolution of invasive plant species in prairie fragments. She received her bachelors degree at the Central Washington University, and did post-bac work in the Australian rainforest with the School for Field Studies. She is a native of Washington state.

On the side Rachel enjoys breakdancing, hip-hop dancing, and gripping/gaffing on movie/television sets.

Profiler: Andy McCall

Hello everyone, this is Andy McCall reporting from the farmhouse in Douglas Co. Minnesota.

I’m currently an assistant professor of biology at Denison University, a small liberal arts college (a SLAC!) in Granville, Ohio. I, like many people on the project, graduated from Carleton College , where I first learned to appreciate and love the prairie landscape under the tutelage of Mark Mckone .

Needless to say, I love teaching and learning and have wanted to be a professor since my time at Carleton. After Carleton, I studied alpine flies in New Zealand while earning my Master’s degree at the University of Canterbury, leafcutter ants in Costa Rica, and wild radishes in California.

I received my doctorate in population biology from UC-Davis in 2006 with Rick Karban and spent some time in Ruth Shaw’s lab at the University of Minnesota last summer, thinking about inbreeding, flowers, and insects — a few of my favorite things! I met Ruth when she came to UC-Davis for a week as a workshop speaker in the Center for Population Biology and we immediately hit it off because we both have done work on the lovely annual plant, Nemophila menziesii . She introduced me to Stuart and the Echinacea project, and the rest is history!

Ruth, Stuart, and I were lucky enough to receive funding through the National Science Foundation to support our work on pollination and seed predation this summer, and I have received generous funds from Denison and the Battelle Foundation to support the students I brought from Denison this year: Josh Drizin, Jameson Pfeil, and Colin Venner. I’m psyched to be part of the project as I am certain that we are learning brand-new things about both Echinacea biology and prairie restoration.

Profile: Josh Drizin

I’m Josh Drizin, a rising senior at Denison University. I’m majoring in Biology (minor in Chemistry). I’m interested in plants, and possibly more specifically in population ecology. I joined Team Echinacea because I wanted the experience in field work and the project sounded interesting. My tick count to date is 10. I rather enjoy photography and quite like listening to music (I need to get back into playing guitar, though).

Amy Alstad, part deux

Let me reintroduce myself. In rare forgetful moment, I left my self logged into the team computer at the farm house, and a prankster who shall not be named shared with the readers of this blog a couple of facts about my life. All of these facts, with the possible exception of the title of the entry are true. I’m a biology major at Carleton, and will be spending the fall semester studying rain forest ecology in Costa Rica. I like being outside in any and all capacities, love ornithology, and enjoy making and consuming delicious food.

Jameson

I’m Jameson Pfeil, the hairiest member of team Echinacea. I’m a rising senior at Denison University in Granville, OH. At School I live at an intentional community called the Homestead. I’m majoring in Biology at Denison and I’m trying to specialize within Biology, but I haven’t settled on anything quite yet. I joined team Echinacea to get experience in the field and to learn a new discipline of biology. I’m originally from southeastern Pennsylvania, most recently Lancaster, PA, just west of the city .(and no I’m not Amish).

You gotta love me: Profile of Colin Venner

I am Colin Venner, Biology major from Denison University. Orignially of Saline, Michigan (just outside of Ann Arbor), I am in the class of 2009 and I am a Taurus (though I don’t fit the profile for one). I enjoy several different styles of music and have been known to “cut a mean rug”. When I’m not counting anthers of flowering Echinacea heads you can find me enjoying life and smiling frequently.