The River Basin Center John Spencer Research Grants support graduate students affiliated with the RBC with small grants of up to $2,000. This program was launched in 2016 with a generous donation from Kathleen Amos, and is named in honor of her son, John Spencer, a former master’s student at the River Basin Center and Odum School of Ecology.
Donations to this fund are currently being accepted through the River Center Fund. Please include RBC Spencer Grants in the Special Instructions on page two of the form.
Meet this year’s recipients
Carolyn Cummins
I am a PhD student in Dr. Amy Rosemond’s lab, and my research is focused on the effects of temperature on stream ecosystems. Specifically, I am interested in how stream insects respond to temperature and how these responses may scale up to affect ecosystem processes like leaf litter breakdown. I am originally from Durango, Colorado and attended Colorado State University. I have always been interested in the natural world, and this was nurtured further after I got involved with research and had the opportunity to do field work late in my undergraduate career. I switched my focus from pre-vet to Ecology, and the rest is history! In my spare time, I enjoy cycling, hiking, rock climbing, and cooking!
Ranjit Bawa
My research includes two general and overlapping areas of interest. First is how modeling non-point source (NPS) pollution influences water quality, especially as it pertains to the role of human interaction. Second, I am interested in advancing economic applications as it relates to agent behavior in the context of decision-making under uncertainty and ultimately, policy design. My most recent work attempts to value changes in water yields by surveying Georgia landowners whose forests serve as watersheds for the provision of critical ecological services (i.e. increased water yields). I am originally from the Boston area and worked in finance before returning to school for graduate studies in Statistics and Agricultural Economics some years later. Most recently, I was based in Minneapolis prior to starting my research program at the University of Georgia. In my spare time, I enjoy exploring new hiking trails around northeast Georgia and basketball.
Derrick Platero
My project is a detailed characterization of soil physical properties, which are critical inputs for modeling landscape-scale water table fluctuations. Spatial predictions of these properties with depth at the field-scale are often related to microtopography, which can be represented with detailed topographic indices. Proximal sensing techniques like electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) and electromagnetic Induction (EMI) are more useful in identifying subsurface features associated with changes in ground conductivity. EMI has been used to quantify a variety of soil properties including texture, moisture, and pH. The objective of this research was to create detailed maps of sand, silt, and clay by depth for a 50-acre crop field in a Georgia Piedmont floodplain using a combination of depth-averaged specific conductance from EMI and topographic indices derived from lidar. We will develop spatial predictions of soil texture for each increment using regression-kriging and random forest models, and will compare them to available data in soil surveys. Models will be validated using k-fold cross validation. The resulting maps will be used to direct a subsequent sampling effort focused on soil hydraulic properties and water table modeling. Soil texture maps are an essential part of the soil assessment framework which can support advances in sensor technology and computer modeling. I am from the Navajo Nation located in New Mexico. I completed my undergraduate degree with a Bachelors in Agriculture in Soil Science with a minor in geology at New Mexico State University. I am currently working on my M.S. in Soil Science at UGA and plan to do my PhD after completion. I have a passion for Geo sciences–specifically soil science, hydrology, geology, and agriculture.
Laura Kojima
I am a first year Master’s student in the CESD program in Odum and my research is focused on alligator ecotoxicology and movement behavior. I am currently looking at the frequency with which alligators on the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site move on and off the site to public hunting grounds and whether this puts hunters/consumers at risk of contaminant exposure. This is done through GPS/telemetry and biological sample collection. The funding from RBC will also contribute to looking at the potential for alligators to act as biological vectors for contaminants through a captive study, in which we collect feces, analyze it for contaminant off-loading, and compare contaminant levels to that of other biological samples such as blood and tail muscle. I have a research background in herpetology, and am originally from California, where I worked with western pond turtles during my undergraduate degree at UC Davis. Right after graduation, I worked with USGS on their giant gartersnake project for a season then took a few months off before moving for grad school.