NSF Funds Project to Engage Undergraduate Students with Plants

Friday, September 20, 2019

Since 2016, six FIU faculty (Javier Francisco-Ortega, John Geiger, Melissa McCartney, José Alberte, and Hong Liu), in partnership with Garden researchers and horticulturists (Brett Jestrow, Chad Husby, Martin Feather, Sergio Gutiérrez, Jennifer Possley, and Jimmy Lange), have developed an initiative to increase plant awareness among freshman.  Graduate (Nichole Tiernan and Jonathan Flickinger) and undergraduate (Jessica Colón and Wendy Villavicencio) students have also been actively engaged in this project. Additional support has been received from the FIU team that coordinates the teaching of introductory courses (Tom Pitzer, Roberto Gutierrez, Janelle Nuñez, and Tamisha Guzmán). Under the leadership of McCartney (Principal Investigator), Liu and Francisco-Ortega (both co-Principal Investigators) NSF has funded an Incubator Grant under the Research Coordination Networks in Undergraduate Biology Education (RCN-UBE) program. Through this NSF-supported project a workshop involving prominent botanists and educators from several prestigious universities and botanic gardens will be hosted in the Garden in early 2020. This brainstorming event aims to further develop  educational activities to alleviate plant blindness among undergraduate students in other higher education institutions.

Nichole Tiernan leading a group of students as they visit the Garden.

Jessica Colón (left) and Melissa McCartney (right) who led the evaluation of the impacts of the visits made to the Garden by the students.