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Current Recipients of the Graduate Student Fellowship

The Philomathia Graduate Fellowship in the Environmental Sciences provides fellowships for graduate students studying issues related to the environment at UC Berkeley. Students are nominated to receive the award on the basis of their high level of academic distinction and exceptional promise.

2024 - 2025 Recipients

ASA CONOVER ASA CONOVER 
INTEGRATIVE BIOLOGY 
PH.D. CANDIDATE 

Asa studies how microbes contribute to the functioning of larger organisms. For his dissertation, he uses the digestive microbiome of the carnivorous California pitcher plant as a model for understanding how microbiomes function and how we can manipulate them. Asa seeks to use knowledge of natural history to identify understudied, non-model organisms that open doors for answering critical questions. In doing so, he hopes to find solutions to human challenges and to highlight the importance of deeply understanding biodiversity.

 

MARÍA JOSÉ (MAJO) NAVARRETEMARÍA JOSÉ (MAJO) NAVARRETE
INTEGRATIVE BIOLOGY 
PH.D. CANDIDATE 

María José (Majo) is an Ecuadorian biologist and a PhD candidate at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in the Tarvin lab. Her research focuses on unraveling the origin and evolution of chemical defenses, with a particular emphasis on guanidinium alkaloids such as the enigmatic Tetrodotoxin, found in the highly endangered frogs of the Atelopus genus. Her work aims to elucidate the mechanisms of toxin acquisition and to integrate her findings into conservation efforts through collaboration with institutions and researchers in Ecuador and Colombia.

 

BAILEY R. NEBGENBAILEY R. NEBGEN
CHEMISTRY
PH.D. CANDIDATE

Bailey's research in the Zuerch Group in the College of Chemistry is focused on using new and developing spectroscopic tools to understand novel behavior of next-generation electronic materials for applications like low-power computing and high-efficiency solar cells. She is passionate about contributing to technological solutions to the climate crisis and is excited about advances in materials science recently that introduce a wide variety of unique materials into potential electronic device fabrication. Despite being a physical scientist, Bailey is an amateur environmentalist and spends much of her free time exploring nature through hiking and backpacking.

 

JENNY LINDER REMPEL JENNY LINDER REMPEL 
ENERGY AND RESOURCES GROUP (ERG), RAUSSER COLLEGE OF NATURAL RESOURCES
PH.D. CANDIDATE 

Climate adaptation presents a potentially transformative opportunity to address the persistent spatialized, racialized, and socioeconomic disparities shaping access to safe water. As a community-engaged scholar in the Energy and Resources Group and a co-leader of the Water Equity Science Shop, I work closely with local, state, and federal partners to understand water supply and quality challenges, to ensure everyone has access to safe, clean, and affordable water. The goal of my research agenda is to elucidate opportunities to eliminate drinking water disparities as a critical component of equitable climate adaptation.

 

KYLE ROSENBLADKYLE ROSENBLAD
INTEGRATIVE BIOLOGY 
PH.D. CANDIDATE 

Insular habitats, such as true islands or patchy mountain meadows, are both valuable natural laboratories and vulnerable biodiversity hotspots. Populations and communities in these habitats may be especially vulnerable to climate change. As a PhD candidate in the Ackerly Lab (Dept. of Integrative Biology), Kyle studies past and future responses of insular plant populations and communities to climate change. Drawing on ecoinformatic databases, common garden studies, and landscape genomics, his work spans spatial, temporal, and phylogenetic scales to understand how climate change will shape future biodiversity in islands and island-like habitats.

 

HENRY J. SQUIREHENRY J. SQUIRE
CHEMICAL AND BIOMOLECULAR ENGINEERING
PH.D. CANDIDATE

Henry is a PhD candidate in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in the Landry Lab working on plant biotechnology tools.  Improving agricultural systems to produce increasing quantities of food under rapidly evolving abiotic/biotic stresses in a sustainable manner represents a major scientific challenge. Plant biotechnology is critical to ensuring the sustainability and security of agricultural systems. Henry’s research broadly advances plant biotechnology by 1) developing novel tools for engineering plants and 2) developing sustainable methodologies for protecting plants from disease.
 

REBECCA TARNOPOL REBECCA TARNOPOL 
PLANT & MICROBIAL BIOLOGY 
PH.D. CANDIDATE

Climate change poses a serious threat to the stability of our food systems world-wide. Crop losses due to insect pests, which can range from 10-20% of net primary productivity, are projected to increase with a warming climate. Parasitoid wasps, which kill their insect hosts to complete development, present a promising avenue by which pest populations can be managed without harming beneficial insects. Rebecca is a PhD candidate in the Whiteman lab at UC Berkeley. Her research characterizes a group of bacterial toxins that were horizontally transferred to the genomes of several insect lineages and now function in anti-parasitoid immune defenses. This research expands our understanding of innate immune responses to macroparasites and may also be used to inform biocontrol methods in the field.