Martin lands fellowship

By Rusty Nixon
Director of Development and Alumni Affairs

MANHATTAN, KS - Curiosity may have killed the cat but it's led 2005 PHS grad Erika Martin to a prestigious fellowship as she pursues her Ph.D at Kansas State University.

Erika - along with several other KSU grad students - has been selected to receive the EIDRoP
(Evidence-Based Inquiry into the Distant, Remote or Past) GK 12 fellowship. The fellowship is designed to help scientists be more involved in the community and relating research to the general public. As part of the fellowship she will be teaching a class at Junction City High School.

"It's exciting to me because it involves explaining research in real terms," said Martin. "As a scientist you should be able to tell people about what you're doing in terms they understand. It's getting out and doing real world science. Everyone should do science. It's everywhere."

Erika is currently in the Ph.D program in the Kansas State Biology Department doing her dissertation on "Ecological and ecosystem consequences of fish movement in a dynamic riverscape". The ecosystems of lakes and rivers has always held a fascination even since her first internship.

"I remember in my first internship doing my undergrad work at Ball State spending time on the Wabash in a boat," she said. "We'd go along and not see any fish at all and then suddenly would come on a log or a stone or a pool in the river and there would be literally hundreds of fish - huge amounts of fish - and I thought that was really cool. It really sold me. I wanted to know why that was."

It was that curiosity that drove her into the field at a very young age.

"I grew up living on the water at my parents house," she said. "Seeing all those things made me wonder how things do what they do. I guess I just thought 'why not keep doing that as an adult?'. I wrote in a journal when I was growing up that I wanted to be a marine biologist. It's just a lot of fun."

Erika carries that fun into her everyday work as she prepares for a career in research and teaching.

"I'm looking forward to the challenges to communicate what I do exactly," she said. "Mis-communication causes a lot of problems. It's very exciting and I feel this is really going to help me."