CoreR 2024 Director's Scholarship Recipients

Tonya Hoevet 

    Tonya is a US Navy veteran and a PhD student in the Institute for Global Ecology at the Florida Institute of Technology (FIT). Her research focuses on coral ecology using photogrammetric applications, and she has additional interest in GIS, deep learning methods, habitat mapping/analysis, and ecological modeling. 

    When asked why the Director’s Scholarship was beneficial for her, she explains that it provided an opportunity to attend the course in person, which covered lessons that she hasn’t been directly exposed to through academia. Before attending coreR, Tonya felt like her network was limited to FIT. She states that “it also allowed me, as a newer scientist in this field, to network with other scientists with varying backgrounds and experience”. Without support from the Director’s Scholarship, Tonya did not have the funding support to cover the entire cost of the course and would have missed out on the opportunity to network with other scientists or may have missed out on the course entirely due to other financial obligations as a PhD student. Tonya notes that “the skills and networks from being able to attend this course in person will directly impact my PhD, and now I can take this back to my research lab to share the knowledge and improve our current processes.”

    The coreR course introduces various data management techniques while giving participants a formal introduction to programming in R. Tonya is particularly excited about learning how to collaborate using the developer platform GitHub, as she believes this will really escalate the way her research lab operates. She states that “this skill is so transferable after academia as well, and I really think this can make huge leaps in how we share scientific results”.

Brooke Helmick

    Brooke is the Director of Policy for the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance and a Chief Policy Fellow, Disability Rights Advocate for the LA City Civil Rights Department. When asked why the Director’s Scholarship was important to her, Brooke explained that without the scholarship, she wouldn’t have been able to participate in the coreR course. She further states that she is “incredibly grateful to the NCEAS team for the opportunity to receive funding to participate and learn”. 

    Brooke’s favorite part of the coreR course were the hands-on activities and practice sessions, which helped her think about how to integrate this new skill set into her current work and research.