Introducing UVM's First Presidential Doctoral Fellows

That role does the microbiome of plants play in their ability to survive extreme environments? How can mathematics be used to democratize artificial intelligence? Which factors are driving the spread of a deadly fungal disease affecting the planet's amphibian populations? What really happens in the brain when the mind wanders?

These are some of the questions the inaugural cohort of the University of Vermont's Presidential Doctoral Fellows will investigate during their doctoral study. Their research may be disparate in nature, but each fellow was selected for demonstrated academic excellence, research experience, and potential for outstanding performance in doctoral study and commitment to the principles of UVM's Common Ground, including integrity, innovation, and openness.

"I am very excited about the impactful research these exceptionally talented Ph.D. students will produce and the broader contributions they will offer to the university at large and communities beyond," says Holger Hoock, vice provost for graduate and postdoctoral studies and dean of the graduate college.

ThePresidential Doctoral Fellowshipsare competitively awarded through the Graduate College. They provide a $35,000 per year stipend for the first two years, matched by an additional three years of funding from the fellow's program or department, and cover tuition, fees, and the cost of the student enrolling with the UVM Student Health Insurance Plan. Fellows receive enhanced mentoring support and have access to professional development funds.

In 2023, former UVM President Suresh Garimella committed $2.5 million of seed funding to devise the program as the university plans to significantly increase its Ph.D. student enrollment. As a support mechanism that comes without the effort associated with graduate assistantships, the fellowships allow incoming students to focus entirely on their studies and scholarship, giving them the freedom to explore-and pivot-as they develop their Ph.D. research projects.

"These fellowships support UVM's growing research prowess as we advance as an R1 institution," says Hoock. "They significantly boost our capacity to recruit outstanding Ph.D. applicants from all backgrounds, both nationally and globally, who will tackle grand challenges."

Collin Coil used artificial intelligence to study democracy as an undergraduate at American University. Now as a doctoral student at UVM, he wants to democratize AI.

Collin Coil

Collin Coil spent his first year of college doing his homework in a McDonald's parking lot in Tennessee where he used Wi-Fi from a nearby police cruiser. This was during the COVID-19 pandemic when classes were remote, and his internet service was unreliable.

"That experience of being disconnected as a result of technology made me understand how imperative technological advancement is to participate in today's modern society," Coil says. "That experience made me want to go into the world of data, go into the world of technology."

He responded to a call for undergraduate researchers and was partnered on projects with professors examining gender representation of experts testifying before Congress and developing tools for tax agency modernization. It was the perfect blend of his mathematical skills and interest in artificial intelligence with faculty members' legal acumen and experience on Capitol Hill.

"They encouraged me to explore and come up with ideas so everything beyond our first paper has used AI to a maximal degree and … we have what we call our ecosystem of papers now," Coil says.

During his undergraduate studies, he co-authoreda paper that appeared in the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policythat explored gender representation in Congressional hearings. Using AI, Coil examined expert testimony and statements from nearly 37,000 witnesses across 7,750 subcommittee and committee hearings. The research team found that women were often excluded from witness panels.

"AI was night vision goggles for me to understand the data and visualize what was lying underneath that data," Coil explains. "… And AI really has helped us parse out and understand the unique values that women's perspectives have in the legislative process and the unique impacts that witnesses have in the legislative process."

In more recent papers and presentations, Coil's team demonstrated that increasing women's representation on hearing panels increased the diversity of information presented to Congress. They team met with legislators and staff members on Capitol Hill to disseminate their findings and encourage more diverse representation on expert panels.

Now, as a first-year doctoral student incomplex systems and data science, instead of using AI to understand democracy, Coil's goal is to democratize AI. He came to UVM to work withNick Cheney, associate professor of computer science, to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of AI systems. His goal is to allow smaller development teams to engage with AI without the need for massive financial investments in huge datasets or specialized computing hardware.

"I felt like Dr. Cheney and I shared a similar perspective about AI which was that that we can take advantage of quirks of AI systems and use those to our benefits," Coil explains.

And while his strength is in mathematics, Coil values the freedom the fellowship allows him to continue building skillsets in new areas-whether it is in entrepreneurship and business courses or through professional development and advising.

"This fellowship has removed the pressure that exists in traditional academia to perpetuate in academia," Coil says. "This sort of institutional investment in me gives me the opportunity to accelerate in my field and jump over hurdles that may have otherwise impeded my progress towards my vision of democratizing AI."

Grace (Ria) Jia joined the lab of Stephen Keller after working as a researcher in the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) program investigating how tree physiology and genetics respond to stress and drought. Photo by Masoumeh Khodaverdi.

Grace (Rei) Jia

Grace (Rei) Jia's interest in science began with a bowl of fruit salad.

"I wasn't a very strong science student in high school and leaned more towards English and the arts and humanities," she says. "I really saw college, and my undergraduate studies, as being my second chance at kind of trying things out and not feeling like I had to stay pigeonholed."

Ordinarily, laboratory environments are sterile and highly controlled, but her edible botany class was different. The professor was different. He provided bowls of salad and set the class to work.

"Eat and figure out what's in there," he told the class, Jia explains with a smile. "And that was just such a different way of approaching teaching than I had ever experienced before … very hands-on, very dynamic. And from that I was like 'science can be very cool and fun."

Jia grew up in Beijing and began her undergraduate studies at a small college on a quiet island in Maine and transferred to UVM for the structure of the wildlife biology program. After graduating in 2017 she served as an AmeriCorps intern with organizations focused on environmental outreach and conservation and honed her teaching skills to make science education accessible-and enjoyable-for all people.

In 2021, after teaching ninth grade science in the Boston area, Jia returned to the classroom as a graduate student at Tufts University to learn traditional bench science skills to complement her field work experience monitoring cyanobacteria blooms in Lake Champlain and shorebird nesting in Massachusetts. There she studied fungal and bacterial communities found in common houseplant roots and plant tissue and became intrigued by the role of the microbiome.

"I learned a lot about extremophiles, which are microbes able to live and persist through the harshest environments you can imagine, like geysers that are Yellowstone National Park or at the edge of volcanoes," Jia explains.

It's an interest she is pursuing as a doctoral student in the lab ofStephen Keller, associate professor of plant biology, examining how plant communities in alpine zones are shaped by climate change. The project is part ofmulti-institution investigationfunded by the National Science Foundation that spans 12 summits in New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Jia's research adds another dimension to the project: exploring how the microbiome may affect how alpine species survive in fragmented and extreme environments.

"I already had a baseline love for science-but this [presidential doctoral fellowship] has really fueled me to work harder than I have and really have the time to be able to do my research, which is not always the case for incoming Ph.D. students," she says.

When she reflects on her circuitous route back to studying plants, Jia believes it strengthened both her knowledge and her resolve to stay in the field.

"It's really easy to think that you have to only do one thing and stick with that for the rest of your career or time in academia," she says. "But giving yourself to time to explore is what got me here and I think that that was extremely valuable for me."

Sam Troast holds a Brahminy blind snake--a tiny snake found on every continent except for Antarctica. This fall she joined the Wildlife Ecology Research Lab, led by Brittany Mosher, assistant professor in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, to study disease dynamics in amphibians.

Sam Troast

Sam Troast didn't always love handling snakes.

"There is a specific person that likes to go out and touch slimy creepy crawlies," she admits. "What originally drew me to them is that they are a marginalized group. They are demonized, they're ostracized, they're disproportionately killed. More dogs kill people per year than snakes do and yet we're killing snakes like crazy."

Troast fell in love with "creepy crawlies" during an invasive herpetology class she took at the University of Florida. She credits the course with presenting a career path that fed her love for nature and enticed her to explore the unknown.

"We went over a very distinct list of organisms that said, 'this is a species that's here, here's where it came from, and here's what it's doing', but then … I could go outside and see all of these things scurrying around, but that we still had unanswered questions about," Troast says.

After graduating she worked for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, but felt her impact was limited. Troast thought conducting research that informed decision making would be more fruitful. In graduate school, she studied the distribution of two tiny nonnative species-the greenhouse frog and the Brahminy blind snake, a species found on every continent but Antarctica. Both are believed to have arrived in the United States as unwitting stowaways in imported tropical plants. While the COVID-19 pandemic delayed some aspects of her research, it opened another avenue to explore and fall in love with: teaching. She was tapped to teach an evolutionary biology course-an opportunity that stoked her passion for teaching and research.

In the fall, Troast joined theWildlife Ecology Research Lab, led by Brittany Mosher, assistant professor in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, to study disease dynamics in amphibians. Her research is part of a multi-institution project funded by the National Science Foundation's Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases program, including UVM; Pennsylvania State University; the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and US Geological Survey. The goal is to understand how temperature interacts with a deadly fungal amphibian disease called Chytridiomycosis to induce changes in host behavior, transmission, and resulting disease outbreaks.

"It is a fungal pathogen that lives in the same environments as frogs and other amphibians, and it has been implicated in the declines of hundreds of amphibian species worldwide," says Troast. "As climate change creates greater temperature fluctuations, we are trying to understand how this variation will influence the impact this disease on amphibians."

This research could help unpack the degree to which variations in temperature in freshwater habitat allow amphibians to regulate their body temperature and influence the spread of chytrid infections, she explains.

With the emotional and financial security offered through UVM's Presidential Doctoral Fellowship, Troast hopes to find creative ways to teach and develop professionally at UVM. Perhaps she will coach someone else to pick up a snake for the first time and fall in love.

"Anybody can have this kind of reversal of mindset when it comes to like the fear of these things," Troast says. "Because herpetofauna are marginalized, they're also disproportionately funded. They're not funded at the rate of like charismatic megafauna. And amphibians are so threatened. This is a pandemic pathogen that is globally wiping these species out. And it's crazy to me that [almost] nobody is talking about it."

In summer 2024, Niharika Singh, the Branimir Von Turkovich Presidential Doctoral Fellow, joined the Glass Brain Laboratory to better understand what happens when the mind wanders.

Niharika Singh

Picture this scenario. You are driving and suddenly realize you can't remember navigating the last mile of road. But there you are, cruising down the highway with no memory of the last minute of your life.

"We all do it," says Niharika Singh, a doctoral student. "We all go to the fridge, open the door, don't know why we came, close it. Go back. What happened to our brain?"

These are the types of questions that Singh hopes to one day answer as a presidential doctoral fellow in David Jangraw'sGlass Brain Laboratory.

"To design studies that could capture that is very hard," she admits.

But what if it is possible?

Singh, the Branimir Von Turkovich Presidential Doctoral Fellow, likes a challenge. She earned her undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering and a master's in data science from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Singh knew she wanted a career in research and began searching for a way to fuse her interests in brain imaging with data science and landed on the lab of David Jangraw, an assistant professor of electrical and biomedical engineering, who studies the brain in naturalistic situations designed to mimic real life experiences.

One project Singh is working on involves teasing apart potential relationships between data gathered from individuals reading a passage of text such as eye movements and electrical activity from EEG sensors. The goal is to pinpoint when mind wandering occurs and identify potential correlations between mind wandering features and eye tracking data.

"If we understand how people behave when their mind wanders, we might be able to intervene and help them be more attentive again," Singh explains.

Eventually, she aims to develop a research project that probes a common experience we may ask ourselves every day-like why does my mind seem to short circuit when I open the refrigerator?

"There are many things that humans do so naturally like sleep and dream that [are] still not so well understood," Singh says. "Then there could be something even more subtle that is still so hard for us to wrap our head around because it's so common that we just don't realize that we are doing it. … And I think that is why I chose this lab because I wanted to understand ourselves in ways that have not been studied before."

Singh attended the team's all hands meeting last spring and enjoyed hearing different members share their research progress and ask for feedback. She knew she was in the right place.

"I loved how intelligent Dr. Jangraw is but also how accessible he is," she explains. "It's such a big commitment and I didn't want to be at a place where I didn't feel like I could share or feel disheartened about asking questions. And it's very interdisciplinary … That was very valuable to me because I did not want to work in a space where such kind of integration doesn't occur because I feel like that's kind of what the future is for any of this research."

The presidential doctoral fellowship allows Singh to spend more time reading papers, sorting data, asking questions, and better understanding the brain, she says. "I get this playing field to let my mind run."

Opportunities such as UVM's Presidential Doctoral Fellowships help attract world class talent to the state. In 2024, Dean Holger Hoock launched the Graduate College's Strategic Plan,"Transforming Graduate Education for the Public Good,"to grow UVM's support of these future leaders in academia, industry, government, and the non-profit sector. Dean Hoock collaborates with the UVM Foundation to develop opportunities for additional, named Presidential Doctoral Fellowships.

 

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