Student Kudos! Student Reseach Incorporates Linguistics with Ecology

Simone Whitecloud is a Ph.D. candidate in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Graduate Program in the McPeek Lab.  Her research involves understanding how plants interact a the community level.  In her work with her collaborator Lenore Grenoble, a professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago.  They work to bridge the gap between humanities and ecology and allows them to determine “if the etymology of plant names and the uses of plants reflect the migration of people on the island [of Greenland] in the last 500 years.” Whitecloud’s research has gained popularity in Greenland, where the population is predominately Inuit.  Full story.

Simone was recently awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (DDIG) from the National Science Foundation for her workk in ethno-botany and ethno-linguistics.