Katey Queen
Katey Queen Awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
Katey Queen (she/her) is a first-year graduate student of environmental science and has just been awarded a prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for her work on the role of climate change and terrestrial plant matter in shaping aquatic communities.
Queen’s research site is Mount St. Helens, where the 1980 eruption and resultant debris avalanche carved ponds into the side of the mountain. Her work explores terrestrial and aquatic interactions in these ponds. Queen also observes the influence of climate change on these ecosystems because alpine environments are especially sensitive to changes in the weather.
Queen is a recent recipient of an Anchor QEA scholarship and a Washington Trail Blazers Research Scholarship, and she’s the lead author on a manuscript from her undergraduate research on plant communities in the Mount St. Helens blast zone. As an undergraduate, she received the Mary Gates Research Scholarship at UW Bothell. After graduating with her bachelor’s degree, she worked in a non-profit lab and earned a certificate in R programming. Queen is also a former field supervisor for an undergraduate research team out of UW Bothell and is proud to be one of the few people who have slept at the base of Mount St. Helens in recent years.
Queen has experienced a lot of success despite the difficulties of living with chronic illness. She stays very busy with fieldwork, her research in the lab, and her work at the Institute for Watershed Studies under her graduate research advisor Dr. Angela Strecker.
Queen says she’s received an amazing amount of support from Dr. Strecker and from her undergraduate advisor, Dr. Cynthia Chang at UW Bothell. Queen wants to encourage other graduate students to “keep applying for opportunities you see that can support your research goals or interests in sciences. Applying to Internships, certificates, small grants, and big fellowships all give you experience in writing and reflecting on your goals and aspirations.”
Connect with Katey Queen on Twitter @Cascadiaeco