Student Research Grant Recipients
2020-21

Stephanie is a first-year master’s student in the Biology program at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. She is researching the recruitment limitations of the rare northern island mallow on Anacapa Island. Stephanie’s love for native plants began in a field biology class at Fresno City College, where her eyes were opened to the natural world. She’s worked as a botanist and technician throughout California for several years – most recently with the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden Conservation and Research team where she was inspired to study the northern island mallow. Stephanie also has a background in Entomology, and even described a new species of tardigrade from Alaska.

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Award: Natalie Hopkins Award  

Brook Constantz is a second-year Ph.D. student at UC Santa Cruz, studying the trajectory and habitat heterogeneity of long-term floodplain restoration. After receiving his B.S. in biological sciences at UC Davis Brook volunteered with the Audubon Society where he became interested in habitat restoration, which was further cultivated through his work with invasive species removal, sustainable farming, and then environmental consulting in and along riparian forests. His hobbies include exploring remote forests, experimenting in the kitchen, and modeling 3D environments. Brook hopes to work for the state and develop novel techniques to monitor large-scale habitat restoration using a combination of field and remote sensing methods

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Award: Doc Burr Grant

Nevin is a 3rd Ph.D. student at University of Pittsburgh researching how floral microbes affect plant-pollinator interactions of serpentine-dwelling jewelflower species in the Sierra Nevada foothills. During his undergraduate study in wildlife conservation, he became infatuated with plants instead of vertebrates. He has worked field seasons in Marin County and the high Sierra as a botanical research technician. While pursuing a master’s degree at San Francisco State, Nevin focused his research on conserving plant-pollinator interactions, participating in studies monitoring pollinator health throughout Marin County. He is excited to continue researching mutualisms between California native plants and their pollinators in an academic setting. When he’s not working, Nevin can be found hiking, skipping rocks, or photographing insects. His favorite plant is Tidy Tips, Layia platyglossa.

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Award: Hardman Native Plant Research Award

Daniel is a graduate student at California State University, Long Beach, where he is working on a flora of the Pleasants Peak area in southern California’s Santa Ana Mountains. His curiosity just got to be too much after many hundreds of hours working on trails as a Cleveland National Forest volunteer and with the Sierra Club. He has backpacked all over the West Coast, and for many years, he was a copy editor at the Los Angeles Times. Daniel is committed to the study and conservation of California’s plants and plant communities. His wife and two kids are the best.

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Award: CNPS Student Research Grant

Tamsen is a second year graduate student in the joint doctoral program at San Diego State University and the University of California Riverside, where she is studying evolutionary biology, with an emphasis on botany and genomics.  After 10 years as a scientist at Illumina, Tamsen felt it was time to combine her interest in DNA with her love of native plants, conservation and remote mountains. Tamsen's current research interests include molecular evolution, polyploidy, hybridization and somatic variation. Tamsen enjoys rock climbing and collecting plant samples in the high Sierras with her young daughters.

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Award: CNPS Student Research Grant

Raphaela is a first-year PhD student in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley where she is advised by Dr. David Ackerly. Gardening and backpacking trips with her family planted the first seeds of a botanical education. Her fascination with the intersections of people, plants and place grew as an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley studying biology, forestry and ecology. This fascination blossomed into a career as a professional botanist and vegetation ecologist for numerous land-management and conservation agencies including the National Park Service and the California Native Plant Society prior to her graduate studies. Raphaela’s research is primarily focused on climate change impacts to botanical diversity in California - especially in unique ecosystems like coastal prairies, serpentine, and alpine environments. She is also interested in reconciling Indigenous knowledge with western science and the cultural implications of climate change. Raphaela spends her leisure time painting watercolors, roller skating, and - of course - looking at plants.

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Award: CNPS Student Research Grant

Rachel is an incoming master's student planning to research alpine plant communities in Yosemite National Park. She grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills where her fascination in the local flora developed at a young age. Since graduating from UC Davis, she has worked with American Rivers, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the National Park Service in Yosemite and Kings Canyon on a variety of ecological restoration and meadow monitoring projects. In her free time, she enjoys playing the accordion, backpacking, and growing native plants and vegetables in her Fresno garden that was formerly bermuda grass.

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Award: Natalie Hopkins Award

Emma is a graduate student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where she is studying the community assembly of a suite of annual wildflowers in the San Joaquin Desert, the effects of invasive annual grasses on those species, and their adaptations to harsh, saline clay soils. As a San Joaquin Valley native, she is passionate about preserving the natural history and imperiled ecosystems of a region that has suffered widespread environmental degradation and looks forward to doing outreach about these rare and unique desert wildflowers in local communities. Emma graduated summa cum laude with her B.S. in Botany from Humboldt State University and came to her master’s thesis topic by way of time spent as a field biologist working in the greater Central California area. Having planned on attending art school until an introductory botany course set her on her current path, Emma does botanical illustration (see her Etsy) with an emphasis on California's native flora, and plans to pursue her Ph.D. upon completion of her master's.

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Award: Hardman Native Plant Research Award

Nina is a second-year master's student at the California Botanic Garden, conducting a floristic inventory of the Manter and Salmon Creek watersheds in the southern Sierra Nevada, Tulare County, CA. She grew up in a small town in central New York, where she attended the State University of New York at Oswego. She received her Biology B.S. in 2017, soon after moving to Los Angeles and beginning a journey to learn the California flora. She started working at the California Botanic Garden (CalBG) as a seed conservation intern in early 2018. After working at the garden for a year and a half, she started in the graduate program at CalBG in 2019. When not doing schoolwork, Nina enjoys reading, photography, hiking, traveling, trying new foods, and spending time with her friends and cat.

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Award: Doc Burr Grant

Reed is a first-year PhD student at UC Davis where he is beginning a study on the systematics and taxonomy of the genus Juncus. Reed received his Master’s degree from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 2020 after completing a thesis on the floristics of the Swanton Pacific Ranch in Santa Cruz County CA. Growing up on the wild and scenic coast of Northern California instilled Reed with a love for nature and diversity at a young age. A dive into Plant Sciences at UC Santa Cruz as well as a series of fantastic mentors and several stints as an agency botanist has left Reed with a passion for studying plant evolution and an understanding of taxonomy as a vital link between scientific knowledge and the effective implementation of conservation strategies. Several encounters with intractable puzzles in Juncus as well as an appreciation for their often understated beauty (but look at those stigmas!) and ecological significance as wetland indicator species motivated Reed's current research. After completing his degree he hopes to remain active in the California botanical community in either an academic or professional capacity.

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Award: CNPS Student Research Grant

Keir is a PhD candidate at California Botanic Garden / Claremont Graduate University where he is working on the systematics of the genus Malacothamnus (the bushmallows). Keir is an avid field botanist who spends much of his free time mapping and photographing plants to better document where they are growing and how to distinguish them. He currently has over 38,000 diagnostic photos of over 3000 plant taxa posted to Calphotos. Keir is also concerned about plant conservation. His research in Malacothamnus, which has several conflicting treatments and 16 CRPR ranked taxa, will greatly clarify the taxon boundaries within the genus facilitating a much-improved understanding of which taxa are of most conservation concern and how to distinguish them from the more common taxa.

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Award: Helen Sharsmith Grant

Sarah is a graduate student in the Master of Science program in Biology at Humboldt State University where she is conducting a macrolichen inventory of the Horse Mountain Botanical Area in the Six Rivers National Forest. Sarah fell in love with lichens a few years ago while obtaining her bachelor’s degree in botany at HSU and hasn’t looked back. Originally from South Carolina, she spends the majority of her free time exploring California’s microclimates in search of natural treasures. For the past two field seasons, she has worked as an invasive plant technician for Redwood National Park and will do so again this year as a crew lead.

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Award: CNPS Student Research Grant

Rachel is a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her thesis focuses on restoration and mitigation in coastal California, and she is studying salt marsh restoration at Elkhorn Slough in Central California. Before graduate school, she worked for NOAA monitoring coral reefs, but was fascinated with the dynamic nature of salt marshes and made the jump to the intertidal zone! The tides, weather, and season make each day at the marsh a little different, and she feels lucky to work in such a beautiful office. She looks forward to a career in applied ecology and management.

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Award: CNPS Student Research Award

Martin is a second-year Botany MS student at California Botanic Garden/Claremont Graduate University where he is working on a flora of Coyote Ridge, an alpine region of the Eastern Sierra. Martin fell in love with natural landscapes and biodiversity at a young age from summers spent camping in the Sierra Nevada and snorkeling in the Sea of Cortez. He graduated with dual degrees in Ecology/Evolution and Environmental Studies from UC Santa Cruz in 2013 and has worked a variety of jobs within the fields of education, conservation, and field biology since then. Martin feels incredibly lucky to be able to pursue his professional passion for biodiversity research and conservation in one of his favorite landscapes, the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada.

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Award: Helen Sharsmith Grant

Sophie is a PhD student at Montana State University, studying the systematics, evolution and conservation of the often overlooked false prairie clovers, Marina, Fabaceae. Growing up in Los Angeles with few wilderness experiences, she did not know becoming a plant taxonomist was an option and her early plant experiments were in gardening, dyeing and weaving, all of which she still enjoys. She has worked in the California floristic province with CNPS, the Jepson Herbarium and Inyo National Forest. She is currently the Early Career Section President of the Society of Herbarium Curators and hopes to keep working for herbaria in the future. She received her M.S. at California Botanic Garden, where she compiled a floristic inventory of Adobe Valley, Mono County. She is especially fond of California's deserts and loves backpacking, hiking and wandering around in search of new plants. 

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Award: G. Ledyard Stebbins Award

Annie is a first-year Biology graduate student at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo with broad interests in the environmental limits to reproduction in plants. Currently, she is studying a recently described monkeyflower, Erythranthe serpentinicola, known only to occur on serpentine rocky outcrops in San Luis Obispo County. Prior to her studies, she worked as a lab technician in a chemical ecology lab, a field assistant for a pollination ecologist in the Sierra Nevada, and a botany intern for California Native Plant Society. Most recently, she did fieldwork for a professor at Cornell studying the range limiting factors of a Clarkia species native to the Southern Sierra Nevada. When not working, she enjoys hiking in new spots on the Central Coast and making small clay sculptures.

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Award: CNPS Student Research Grant