Ashley Lidman is a first year Master’s student in Natural Resources at the University of Vermont. She’s working with Austin Troy and Morgan Grove on a study of vegetation and social structure in the Cub Hill, Gwynns Falls and Baisman's Run watersheds. Originally from Rhode Island, Ashley received a degree in Urban Studies from Brown University and then went on to teach environmental education up and down the East Coast. She has worked for the Urban Ecology Institute in Boston, studying bird biodiversity and water quality with urban students; in the White Mountains for the Appalachian Mountain Club; and most recently in DC for Casey Trees, an urban forestry organization.

 
Paul is the second of five kids and grew up all over the US. He got his BA in Philosophy from Yale University in 1999, focusing on epistemology. He spent the next four years away from academia, working for a dot-com in San Francisco, hiking the Appalachian Trail, and being a lab rat in Kevin O'Hara's silviculture lab at UC Berkeley. He did his Master's research at SUNY-ESF with Ruth Yanai, investigating liming and cation exchange reactions in acid forest soils across the northeast. Currently, Paul is working on a Ph.D. at the University of Vermont with Dr. Jennifer Jenkins. His research looks at how management affects carbon dynamics in urban and suburban vegetation, and, in a broader perspective, how urban vegetation contributes to a healthy urban ecosystem.

 
I’m working on a Masters in Marine Estuarine Environmental Science under the tutelage of Dr. Kaushal. We started working together in ’06 on an NSF REU project that investigated denitrification potentials associated with various organic matter sources as potential microbial indicators in forested, degraded, and restored streams of Baltimore County, MD. Now I’m using a SEA Grant Fellowship to expand this work using the Push-Pull method—as well as possibly doing a more in depth study of such microbial communities. I went into the field of environmental science because I’m passionate about sustainability and want to try to do my little part for my native state’s Chesapeake Bay.

 
Kirsten Schwarz is a fourth year PhD student at Rutgers University working on the BES with Steward Pickett, Mary Cadenasso, and Rich Pouyat. Broadly, she is interested in the links between ecosystem and public health. Kirsten is currently studying the spatial distribution of lead in urban soils and possible correlations between lead levels in urban soil and present and historic land cover. Her research aims to address which landscape features are most important in predicting lead levels in urban soil. Kirsten received a BA in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic in 2000.

 
My research interest is urban ecohydrology. As a doctoral student in geography, I am researching how location and arrangement of impervious and lawn surfaces influence storm water runoff and associated nonpoint source loads.

 
Gwendolyn Stanko
PhD, Marine, Estuarine and Environmental Sciences
IGERT mentor: Sujay Kaushal
 
Bachelor of Science, minor in Geography, December 2006, University of Maryland Baltimore County
 
Research Interests
Studying the effectiveness of various low impact development designs at improving water quality in urban water bodies
 
I am broadly interested in performing research to determine the effectiveness of various low impact development designs on water quality in urban water bodies. In part, I intend to study the effects of low-impact development on the reduction of eutrophication of water bodies downstream of highly urbanized environments. Because of the negative effects of ever-increasing urbanization on streams, wetlands and other water bodies, developing cost-effective methods for improving urban water quality is of utmost importance. While conducting this research, I plan to work with urban watershed groups to implement the most beneficial low impact development designs for a given situation.