Every year, we ask graduate students from across Jornada Research Network (JRN) Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER)-affiliated institutions to apply for our summer Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). The chosen recipients receive funding through support of the US National Science Foundation LTER Program to conduct research at the Jornada, with an additional student funded by the NMSU College of Agriculture, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) Agricultural Experiment Station (AES). This year, we were able to offer funding to four students who are planning valuable research that will benefit JRN-LTER research themes and goals. Read below to find out more about these graduate students and their proposed research.
Juliemar Cuevas-Hernandez
Juliemar is currently a master’s student at New Mexico State University (NMSU) in the Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Ecology Department. Her GRFP research will investigate how habitat change due to shrub encroachment is impacting breeding songbird’s diet and body condition. She is this year’s recipient of the Deb Peters Dryland Ecology fellowship, an award established by the ACES College at NMSU to recognize Dr. Deb Peters’ leadership of the LTER program and dryland ecology.
Yareni Avila
Yareni is a graduate student attending the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Her proposed GRFP research project is entitled “Investigating Predictors of Soil Microbial Diversity and Composition Across Four Dryland Regions.” She will be working with her advisor, Dr. Nicole Pietrasiak, in her Dryland Microbes Lab at UNLV.
Kalpana Kukreja
Kalpana is a Ph.D. candidate in Dr. Darrouzet-Nardi’s lab at the University of Texas at El Paso. As part of her dissertation research and the JRN-LTER GRFP summer fellowship, she is working on a project within the Dryland Critical Zone Collaborative Network at Jornada. Her research employs a multiomics approach to understand how soil metabolites and microbial communities contribute to phosphorus acquisition strategies in dryland soils.
Dylan Stover
Dylan is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) working with Dr. Jennie McLaren as part of the Drylands Critical Zone Thematic Cluster. His research explores how resource scarcity (i.e. water and nutrients) limits biological productivity in dryland ecosystems. Dylan recently wrapped up a three-year experiment at the Jornada that produced collaborations with researchers at UTEP, UNLV, the USGS, and the USDA. He aims to find new insights into how soil fertility influences carbon cycling and storage in drylands. Aside from research, Dylan represents the Jornada LTER as a graduate student representative on the LTER network’s Graduate Student Committee as well as the network’s Broadening Participation Committee. Before entering graduate school, Dylan received a Bachelor of Science from UC Berkeley and spent time in Australia studying fairywren mating dynamics.