Major: Geology
Hometown: Beckley, West Virginia

Fedders, a Chancellor’s Scholar and Honors student, presented her research on investigating the effects of winter weather events and long-term stream salinity. She completed her research with Dr. William P. Anderson Jr., professor in and chair of the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences, and Dr. Kristan M. Cockerill, associate professor in the Department of Cultural, Gender and Global Studies.

At the conference, Fedders was presented with AGU’s Outstanding Student Presentation Award. She is the first Appalachian geological and environmental sciences student to receive the award, competing against largely graduate students from across the country and the world.

Majors: Geology; mathematics and geology, quantitative geoscience
Hometowns: Pisgah Forest and Boone

For their research projects, Field and Hengst, a Chancellor’s Scholar and Honors student, used Landsat satellite imagery to investigate the evolution of proglacial lakes in northwest North America over the past 30 years. Proglacial lakes are lakes in front of glaciers that form when glaciers recede. Many of these lakes are forming and/or growing due to climate warming and glacier retreat.

Hengst has been developing an automated programming approach to extract proglacial lake area from satellite imagery and document its change over time, and Field has been investigating physical controls, such as climate, on proglacial lake change behavior.

Both Field and Hengst received funding from Appalachian’s OSR, with a majority of support coming from the National Science Foundation (NSF), for their research with Dr. William Armstrong, assistant professor in the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences.

Degree: B.S. in geology
Hometown: Grand Rapids, Michigan

Appalachian alumna Paschall ’18 received travel assistance for the 2018 AGU Fall Meeting from OSR, as well as external funds for her research costs associated with the work she presented from the Geological Society of America (Southeastern section) and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.

The research she presented at the AGU conference was completed as part of her senior thesis, with a focus on the role of volcanism in mass extinctions, and specifically, about large-scale volcanic activity that may have contributed to or triggered the third pulse of extinction during the Late Devonian period — or about 360 million years ago.

Her research was recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Global and Planetary Change, in which she is the lead author on a paper that includes collaborators from Germany, Japan, Vietnam and the U.S.

Major: Geology
Hometown: Holly Springs

Yokeley received an Undergraduate Research Assistantship in fall 2018 and an OSR travel grant to fund the research he presented at the AGU Meeting.

Yokeley’s presentation was the culmination of his independent undergraduate research, in which he examined the impact of vegetation cover changes on soil temperatures in the southern Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina.

He is the first author on his presentation and was the sole author presenting the research to a geoscience audience of professionals and academics.

Participating in the meeting provided Yokeley with an avenue to receive feedback on his research and allowed him to network with potential graduate program advisers and future collaborators.

Degree: B.S. in geology
Hometown: Cary

Appalachian alumnus Takashita-Bynum ’18, who is now a graduate student at the Watershed Institute at Murray State University in Kentucky, presented a research poster at the AGU conference that he co-authored with Dr. Cynthia Liutkus-Pierce, professor and director of environmental sciences in Appalachian’s Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences.

Their poster presented a paleoenvironmental reconstruction of an early Miocene (approximately 17 million-year-old) primate fossil site in western Turkana, Kenya.

Liutkus-Pierce described the project: “In short, apes and monkeys diverged from a common ancestor somewhere in the latest Oligocene period (around 20 million years ago) and our work is significant, because the early Miocene is a time when we should be able to find evidence in the fossil record of the earliest primate groups that would eventually lead to apes (Hominoidea) and, eventually, to us (humans). Essentially we are searching for our earliest ancestor.”

Takashita-Bynum recently received a $10,000 early-career grant from the National Geographic Society for his graduate work in Ethiopia.

Majors: Both Rossell and Faught are chemistry, environmental chemistry majors
Hometowns: Weaverville and Durham

Rossell and Faught, both of whom are Honors students at Appalachian, received OSR support for supplies and assistance with travel to the AGU conference.

They presented their research on the relationships between biogenic and aromatic volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and phytoplankton communities in the North Atlantic Ocean. For the project, they analyzed air canister samples that were collected during the May 2017 Phosphorus, Hydrocarbons, and Transcriptomics cruise aboard the R/V Neil Armstrong on a five-detector gas chromatography system for over 80 individual VOCs.

Their research was completed with Dr. Robert Swarthout, assistant professor in the A.R. Smith Department of Chemistry and Fermentation Sciences; fellow student Ian Trott, a senior chemistry major from Matthews; Dr. Barkley C. Sive, an atmospheric chemist in the Air Resources Division of the National Park Service in Denver; and Dr. Yong Zhou, a research scientist in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University.