5 minute read
Martin (‘20) earns NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
The saying is that money doesn’t grow on trees, but for Blaine Martin (’20), his interest in studying trees helped him earn a major scholarship for graduate school.
Martin will begin work this fall on his doctorate in the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Department of Plant Biology. He’ll do so with the benefit of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship as well as a Merit Doctoral Fellowship from the university.
The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions. The prestigious fellowship is the oldest of its kind.
The NSF GRFP will provide Martin a $37,000 living stiped as well as a $16,000 education stipend for three years over a fiveyear period.
Martin said the NSF grant will allow him to conduct extensive fieldwork in western Panama as well as potential new field sites to study plant-fungal interactions for his doctoral work.
Martin spent the past year living in Panama while completing research with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
While there, he worked with Dr. Erin Spear, a staff scientist at STRI, on several projects related to foliar fungal pathogens of tropical trees.
One of the primary focuses of the research was to understand how environmental variations in the canopy and host range affected the fungal pathogen community of leaves.
One particular project that Martin led examined the role of seasonality on seedling foliar fungal pathogen communities and their population dynamics.
He learned about STRI while working in a lab at Tulane University, where he earned his
bachelor’s degree in environmental biology. He was invited to join a graduate student who was studying under Dr. Sunshine Van Bael, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Tulane who also earned her doctoral degree from UIUC, as a field technician in Panama for a summer.
That experience “deepened my passion for fungal ecology and created a connection to one of the best tropical field stations in the world, STRI,” Martin said.
Martin plans to investigate the interactions between fungi and their plant hosts as well as their symbiotic effects on each other, particularly in the tree genus Podocarpus, a conifer that lives in low-nutrient sites in western Panama.
His hope is to understand how root-associate fungi may play a role in the trees’ survival in low-nutrient soil.
The time leading up to the notification that he had received the NSF fellowship was stressful. Fellowship notifications were released around the same time that graduate school acceptance decisions were being announced. He was still at STRI living in shared housing when he decided to check the NSF portal one last time before going to bed.
“When signing in, the first thing I saw was ‘Fellow Portal.’ My heart started to race as everything pointed to me winning the award. I searched for my name on the official list and still could not believe it when I read ‘awarded’ next to my name,” said Martin, who then called friends and family to update them on the good news.
“It was still hard for me to process given this was going to change my whole graduate school experience. After all the congratulations and the feeling settled, I began to feel extremely proud of myself. It felt like all my work throughout undergrad and this path in science was paying off.”
Martin credited his experience working in Van Beal’s fungal
ecology lab at Tulane and the fieldwork experience at STRI, from which he was able to complete an honors thesis, directly helped his research proposal he submitted to NSF.
He said the merit section of his application was bolstered by his early introduction to laboratory skills and research through his Life Sciences Capstone with ASMSA instructors Dr. Patrycja Krakowiak and Dr. Whitney Holden.
“My exposure to independent scientific research in the ASMSA Life Science Capstone provided me the inquisitiveness and confidence that helps me excel in research today,” Martin said. “I learned how to ask scientific questions, craft a hypothesis, create methodology that provides relevant results and discuss results in a larger context.
“Having Dr. Krakowiak, an expert in genetics, and Dr. Holden, an expert in microbiology, provided a robust training in the methods of biology. Learning from experienced scientists how to do research was a formative moment.”
Both the personnel and physical resources allowed him to “flourish as a scientist years before my peers,” including being allowed to join a lab during his first year of undergraduate studies. He had the opportunity to serve as a mentor and lead researcher for his undergraduate peers.
Martin’s experience at ASMSA also inspired him to give back to the school in ways that he could. He participated in a recent Arkansas Summer Research Institute led by Krakowiak and Holden as a panelist and as a mock judge for student capstone posters.
Martin said those experiences reminded him of the important role ASMSA plays for the state of Arkansas and the future of science.
“Mentorship and giving back to early-career scientists (are some) of the most impactful things I learned directly through watching instructors at ASMSA inspire students every day,” he said.
