The Botany in Action Fellowship program at Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens fosters the development of a next generation of plant-based scientists who are committed, first, to excellent research, and second, to educational outreach. Open to PhD students enrolled at US graduate institutions and conducting plant-based scientific field research, the BIA program provides Fellows with funding for use towards field research in the US or abroad and a trip to Phipps, to engage in science outreach training and opportunities to share his or her research to public audiences.
Current BIA Fellows are engaged in research in locales from Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, and Illinois to Nepal and India. Their work covers topics ranging from the role of green roofs in urban biodiversity and the influence of heavy metal soil pollution on plants and pollinators to identification of plants used by healers that protect brain cells from the progression of Parkinson’s disease.
March’s featured fellow is Jessica Turner. Jessica (Jessi) is a PhD student at West Virginia University, studying American ginseng, a medicinally and economically valuable native plant. Jessi is researching both the ginseng plant and the people who harvest it, with the goal of creating a plan that can benefit both. She wants to know if ginseng can grow in areas that were previously used for other purposes, such as mining and agriculture. She is also studying motivation for harvesting ginseng in the Appalachian population. Medicinal plants are becoming increasingly rare; Jessi combines botany and social science to help save them.
Read an update on Jessi’s research and life as a scientist at the Botany in Action website!
You can follow Jessi and all of the BIA fellows as they study plants across the US and across the world at the Follow the Fellows section of our Botany In Action website.
The following Botany In Action update was written by Amanda Joy, Botany in Action Fellowship coordinator.
The photo was provided by Jessica Turner.
