Jessica Hope Whiteside '01 and Mark McMenamin, professor of geology and Whiteside's thesis adviser.

Jessica Hope Whiteside '01, a geology major with a passion for paleontology, and Hannah Gilbert '99, who will begin graduate studies in medical anthropology, have been awarded prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships. Whiteside will begin graduate studies at Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory this fall, and is a recipient of Barry M. Goldwater and Morris K. Udall scholarships. Gilbert’s recent honors include an Andrew W. Mellon grant and a Fulbright fellowship. Their honors solidify their place at the forefront of the nation’s science students.

Hannah Gilbert '99

Each year, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awards Graduate Research Fellowships to approximately 900 outstanding students pursuing graduate studies in mathematics, engineering, and physical, biological, behavioral, and social sciences. The three-year support carries a stipend of $18,000 per year, plus an educational allowance of $10,500 per year to the fellowship institution. The fellowships are awarded to United States citizens who are college seniors, first-year graduate students, and others who have completed a limited amount of graduate study in areas of science, mathematics, or engineering.

"Jessica is a natural science talent the likes of which Mount Holyoke has never seen before, and may never see again—although I hope we do," says Mark McMenamin, professor of geology and Whiteside's thesis adviser. Her "precocious talent" became apparent her first year at MHC, he says. "She took my 300-level seminar in paleontology and distinguished herself immediately." McMenamin and Whiteside coauthored the lead article, on hypermarine upwelling, for the Journal of Biospheric Science last year, and Whiteside also served as McMenamin's teaching assistant for his course The History of Life in 1999.

Whiteside last week participated in the Comparative Developmental Biology Conference at Statione Zoologica in Naples, Italy, and has been engaged in what McMenamin refers to as "high-level" lab research at Mount Holyoke and the University of Massachusetts. In addition to her work at various locations in the United States, she has experienced fieldwork in Scotland and Costa Rica, as well as attending a conference in Spain. Her special interest is the field of paleoclimatology—the study of the interaction between earth's biosphere and earth's environment. "She is also interested in global climates and how the atmosphere may have been altered over time," says McMenamin.

For her thesis, Whiteside has been studying millipedes in fossil organisms that lived 50 million years ago and has been working at a UMass lab with Lynn Margulis, Distinguished University Professor of Geosciences. But over the course of her undergraduate studies, she has studied a wide variety of subjects that include global carbon budgets nutrient exchanges in earth’s biota, mass extinction patterns, the coevolution of skeletonization and consciousness, and trilobites from Utah Cambrian marine shales. At Mineral Management Services, where Whiteside worked as a Student Conservation Association diversity intern, she examined deepwater well samples containing fossils of unicellular creatures called Foraminifera.

Whiteside—who enjoys tai chi and esoteric poetry in her "spare time"--grew up in a unique household in Arkansas. Her father worked as an aeronautical engineer for NASA, and she was surrounded by nineteen foster children of multiethnic backgrounds and three biological siblings, including a twin. Early on she came to a recognition of the meaning of diversity--which she believes ultimately inspired her science passions. In a prepared statement, she writes, "The diversity of life, as we are beginning to recognize, is crucial for the ecological health of the planet. Indeed my research goals explicitly address a scientific (thermodynamic) understanding of the relationship between biodiversity and the global health of the planet. Thus for me, diversity is related to biodiversity, and is not just a political, but a scientific and ecological concept which requires rigorous scientific attention."

Hannah N. Gilbert '99 will begin graduate studies in medical anthropology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, in the fall. She recently returned from Senegal, where she pursued HIV-related research on a Fulbright grant, and is currently working in the department of social medicine at Harvard University.