Student Spotlight
Field Research Brings Students Back to Their Hometowns
By Nathalie Wolfram
Every several weeks throughout the winter, Payton Adams rides his snowmobile across the rugged terrain of Montana’s Flathead Reservation. Adams, a UM junior wildlife biology major from Ronan, replenishes batteries and memory cards for the seven trail cameras he and a group of Arlee High School students set up late in the fall. Back then, the roads into prime wildlife habitat were still passable by school bus.
site on the Flathead Indian Reservation.
Adams pulls weeks’ worth of images of local wildlife from the cards. The first time he brought a fresh batch of images back to Arlee teacher Bonnie White’s environmental science club in early 2018, Adams said he was “just as excited as they were” by the diversity of species that the cameras captured. The list now includes mountain lions, bobcats, black bears and deer. Adams and his students still hope that one of these months, the images will include a moose or a wolf.
Now in his second year leading outreach at Arlee High School, Adams visits White’s students monthly as part of a National Science Foundation-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU), which is supervised by L. Scott Mills, a wildlife biology professor and UM associate vice president of research for global change and sustainability.
Through the REU, Adams conducted fieldwork gathering data on snowshoe hares as part of Mills’ research on how climate change affects animals that use camouflage to change color seasonally. With mentorship from Lisa Mills of UM’s Broader Impacts Group he also shares what he learns in the field with high school students on the reservation.
The technical skills that Adams developed through his REU, including using trail cameras to gather wildlife data, feed directly into the experiential learning he leads with high school students. White, the Arlee High School science teacher, praises Adams as a role model for her students, who are mostly juniors and seniors.
“Many of our students are avid wildlife enthusiasts, so any chance to get out into nature and learn more on how to conduct scientifically sound, noninvasive wildlife capture studies is a wonderful treat,” she says, adding that the students even raised money so that the club could buy their own trail cameras to set at other locations.
Adams — who didn’t always expect to graduate from college, let alone pursue a career in wildlife biology one day — sees his goal as “getting students to experience trying something out,” even if they decide they don’t like it and decide to pursue something else.
“If I get one student who wasn’t planning to go to college to think again,” he says, “then I succeeded.”
Adams also has led camera-trapping activities with high school students in the Upward Bound college readiness program at Salish Kootenai College and at spectrUM Discovery Area’s Science Learning Tent at the Arlee Celebration.
The REU program provides support for undergraduates to participate in faculty research projects such as the Mills Lab’s NSF-funded study on how human-caused stressors and management can affect wildlife population dynamics. Mills describes REUs as a vital tool for increasing representation of minorities and other underrepresented populations in STEM, including Native Americans.
Landon Magee, a UM sophomore wildlife biology major from Browning, is one of these students. For a week in June 2018, Magee joined Mills’ field crew near Seeley Lake, where he worked alongside graduate-student researchers and learned how to safely trap and release snowshoe hares and collect tag numbers and DNA samples.
Later that summer, Magee returned home to the Blackfeet Reservation, where he used field techniques he had learned on Mills’ research crew to design transects and take field observations to measure the presence and numbers of jackrabbits on a plot of tribal land just south of the Canadian border.
Magee further deepened his research experience as a Native Science Fellow with Hopa Mountain, a Montana nonprofit that invests in citizen leaders making positive impact in rural and tribal communities.
Through his fellowship, Magee partnered with Blackfeet Community College’s Native Science Field Center, where he worked with a crew of Browning high school students and recent high school graduates on a beaver mimicry project, creating structures that encouraged beavers to build their dams at downstream locations where flooding would not cause property damage.
Reflecting on his research and field experiences, Magee says, “It just set me up for opportunities. You get your foot in the door.”
Mills sees his role as providing not just practical experience — from tracking wildlife with radio telemetry to learning to drive stick shift — but also opportunities for his students to connect with peers and other mentors at all stages in their careers.
Adams sees his REU experience as a “springboard” into his future graduate work and career, citing in particular the connections he formed out in the field and at the barbecues and social gatherings Mills regularly organizes for his field crews.
Montana tribal colleges also have played a vital role in the success of Mills’ students — both academically and in the field. For Magee, BCC’s Native Science Field Center provided on-the-ground connections and applied research opportunities. In addition to collaborating with SKC’s Upward Bound program, Adams himself enrolled at SKC for a semester before re-enrolling at UM.
Mills also mentored Sarah Twoteeth, a nontraditional student who completed her bachelor’s degree at SKC while serving as a field tech with the Mills Lab through an REU. Twoteeth was recently admitted to UM’s highly selective wildlife biology graduate program with funding from the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership.
Both Magee and Adams describe their REU experience in the Mills Lab as transformative. The son of a Montana State University alumnus, Magee had always assumed that he would become a Bobcat, but he was drawn to UM when he learned that its wildlife biology program had been ranked №1 in North America. With the research experience and mentorship he has gained in the Mills Lab, he now dreams of becoming the first Native wildlife biologist for the Blackfeet Tribe.
Adams also hopes to work as a wildlife biologist on the reservation where he grew up.
“One of the best things I can do for the tribe is come here and learn and then return home to preserve the land where I was raised and protect it for future generations,” he says.
Biochemistry Research Whisks UM Student Abroad
By Alecia Gray and Nicole Lariviere
Last spring, UM biochemistry major Charlotte Langner took the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology certification exam. Anyone who has met her wasn’t surprised when she passed the exam with distinction.
A Missoula native, Langner was interested in biology from a young age — particularly the molecular aspect of it. She heard UM had an outstanding biochemistry program from her mom and dad, longtime researchers in the University’s Wildlife Spatial Analysis Lab and Department of Geosciences. Additionally, she was encouraged to major in biochemistry by Chris Palmer, chair of the chemistry and biochemistry department.
Langner excelled in her department, receiving awards every year. She also earned a math minor, was an active member of the Davidson Honors College and graduated as a Franke Global Leadership Initiative Fellow.
Passing the ASBMB exam with distinction was her goal, and she felt well-prepared by her UM courses. She found Bruce Bowler’s Biochemistry Research Lab course, in which they made novel mutations to proteins, to be extremely interesting and helpful for the rigorous exam.
“Steve Lodmell and Klara Briknarova, who taught the Advanced Biochemistry series, are the best!” she says.
In addition to taking classes, Langner worked in the Ryckman Lab as an undergraduate research assistant applying biochemistry to molecular virology research. Over the summer, she traveled abroad as a National Science Foundation Fellow to study the microbiome of the musk ox, conduct fieldwork in Greenland and lab work in Denmark, as well as analyze the data for publication.
Langner enjoyed sharing what she learned as a peer leader for the general chemistry course for two years. In that role, she attended the lectures and led a two-hour workshop each week, mentoring a small group of students through one of the most rigorous core STEM courses at UM. This experience helped her cement concepts and built a strong foundation to pull from during her ASBMB exam.
She says it helped that she took the exam while taking relevant courses. To prepare, she took a practice exam, prioritized sleep and exercise, and ate a hearty breakfast. On the day of the exam, she figured that she either knew the concepts or didn’t. She leaned on applied knowledge she learned in and out of the classroom — not on rote memorization.
Langner appreciates that the University’s biochemistry program is accredited by ASBMB and pays for students to take the standardized exam.
“My biochemistry courses and experiences have been foundational,” she says. “I feel like I could go anywhere.” •
