Grad student driven by passion to protect ecosystems

For USD graduate student Brianna Henry, insects are all the buzz.

Henry, who’s studying the effects of agriculture on aquatic insect populations, was awarded a prestigious fellowship funded by the National Science Foundation which provides a stipend and covers tuition for up to three years.

Henry graduated from the Clarion University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor’s Degree in biology last spring.

After contacting assistant professor Jeff Wesner about his work with wetlands while she was still completing her undergraduate degree, he recommended she apply for the fellowship so she could come to the state with little to no expense.

“I’d heard it talked about before, but it’s super competitive so it’s not the kind of thing I would’ve gone into if I didn’t have his support,” she said.

Henry and Wesner, now her graduate adviser, wrote a proposal together in the fall of her senior year. The proposal had to include what merit the research would bring to the scientific community, as well as how it would have a broader impact in the non-scientific community.

Wesner said it’s “very rare” to receive funding on the first try as Henry did. Many of the applicants that are funded come from Ivy League schools, he added.

“The grant itself, it doesn’t actually fund specific projects… it’s mostly funding the potential they see in the student. So when she applied, it wasn’t just that she had a great research idea, it’s that she had other things going on besides research,” he said. “They fund a person that they think can be a good scientist, not just a research proposal.”

Henry shows that potential in her work at USD, Wesner added.

Henry found out she was one in the 15 percent of students that were chosen in April of her senior year.

“I was so excited,” she said. “These things never happen to me.”

By that point, Henry said she had already decided she would enroll at USD the following year, fellowship or no fellowship.

Despite missing the hills and trees that make up Pennsylvania’s physical features, Henry said the move has been a smooth transition.

“The people here are really great,” she said.

Coming out of an undergraduate level where she didn’t have a great adviser experience, Henry said relationships have been incredibly important to her in her time so far at USD.

“I’ve had nothing but support here and it’s so great,” she said. “All of the faculty I’ve worked with or talked with are very invested in helping in any way they can in any expertise they have.”

Wesner talks highly of Henry as well, and said she’s adept at coming up with good ideas, communicating them effectively and seeing them come to fruition.

“Basically she somehow is able to do all that and not get bogged down in too many details, but also focus on enough details that matter,” he said.

Why insects

The broad question Henry is trying to answer with her data is: “How do agricultural activities influence aquatic insect populations?”

In addition to some more controlled labs, Henry is studying insects in the prairie pothole region, an area with many glacially-created wetlands that often go right up alongside fields.

Henry said this is significant because of the irreplaceable role that insects play in the ecosystem — they feed fish, frogs and birds, just to name a few.

“Ultimately it becomes important because aquatic insects are a huge flux of food source for like terrestrial populations,” she said. “They play this linking role where their metamorphosis connects both the aquatic system and the terrestrial system.”

Wesner says something similar when describing insects’ broad impact to people outside of the sciences.

“Most people don’t care about the insects but they might care about birds and whether they can take their grandson hunting in the future,” he said. “Well, those birds need bugs and so we study the bugs.”

In addition to linking populations, Henry said studying both larvae and adult insects is important because many existing scientific studies have focused only on larvae populations. In her research, Henry will try to determine if one population is maybe more sensitive than the other, which would make one a better indicator of a healthy ecosystem.

Wesner said though all states collect insects for information on water quality, none of them study adult insects, because it’s more difficult to do so. He’s assuming the results of Henry’s research may tell a different story when it comes to how contaminants from agricultural drains affect wetlands.

“We rarely measure their survival to adulthood, and of course the whole point of surviving is that you can become an adult and reproduce,” he said. “So she’s essentially adding that phase on.”

Henry’s field work is done at a research site called USD’s Experimental Aquatic Research Site (ExARS). In the meantime, while it’s winter, Henry is evaluating the “sheer volume of data” that was collected last summer, a process that takes several months.

Community outreach also keeps Henry busy. She’s been working mostly with daycare and elementary school students, giving them a sort of “immersion experience” where they can see, touch and learn about the insects Henry is studying. She plans on reaching out to middle and high school students in the future as well.

Why science

Henry said she’s always had an interest in science and animals, but the draw to a science career really started during her undergraduate degree, when she joined a research lab that allowed her to be outside and hunt for frogs and salamanders. She also had a summer internship in her home state, working in the water quality division of the Department of Environmental Protection, where she was constantly outside on boats, hunting for fish and evaluating water quality.

“It depends on the day I guess. But I think ultimately I kind of see the end goal or see the reason why I’m doing these things and so I think it’s really important to protect ecosystems,” she said. “And so to be able to look at things and find problems and then hopefully find solutions for them, I think is a lot of what keeps me motivated.”

Henry loves to learn new things, especially when it comes to such a “diverse group of organisms.”

“I get to work with different things all the time and I get really excited about learning things so I think that’s ultimately a lot of what drives me to keep doing this,” she said.

Though not everyone may get excited about the prospect of working closely with insects, Henry finds their sheer numbers and their affect on ecosystems “impressive,” especially because they seem like such a small part of the animal kingdom.

“They end up being so important to making everything run right,” she said.

Though she may not always be studying insects, Henry said she’ll likely stick to aquatic systems. After her time at USD, she’d like to work for a year or two with some government agency. After that, she said she’ll probably go for her PhD.

But more importantly, Henry said she just wants to learn new things from new people.

“(I want to) have an opportunity to work with different professors in different places in different ecosystems, different projects like that,” she said. “At this point I’m just trying to get as much experience as I can.”