When I was 17, I traveled farther south (much closer to where you all are now!) to research salt marshes at the Chincoteague Bay Field Station on Whallops Island, Virginia. Guess what? You could go there too! It is not that far from Washington, DC!
What do all of these jobs have in common? They required that I get really dirty to study the importance of our natural world.
Although our ecosystems in the United States are really cool, I wanted to discover the wonders of faraway places. After my first year at college, I worked in Suriname (a small country in South America - can you find it on a map?) for an organization called Conservation International. Suriname is the greenest country on Earth. It has about 94% forest coverage!
I loved studying in the tropics so much that I spent the next three summers in Madagascar. Although you may have heard about Madagascar from the popular movie, Madagascar does not, in fact, have lions or zebras. What it does have is lemurs (animals related to monkeys and humans), chameleons (see my profile picture), and many wonderful people.
My main project in Madagascar was studying how lemurs help the forest by acting as gardeners. They eat fruits, poop out the seeds, and then new trees grow! This process is called “seed dispersal” and is very important for forests all over the world. Through my work with ecology (the study of how living things interact with their environment), I have also traveled to Bangladesh and Brazil.
I recently graduated from Harvard University, where I studied biology, as well as environmental science and public policy. College is hard work, but I had a blast studying nature and learning from my teachers and friends.
