Four Geography Graduate Students are Awarded the GRFP, Setting Campus Record!

Gabriela Rocha Sales — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:41:36 +0000

Four Geography Graduate Students are Awarded the GRFP, Setting Campus Record! Gabriela Rocha Sales Mon, 04/27/2026 - 15:41

Four Geography graduate students were awarded the prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)! The National Science Foundation’s GRFP is to help ensure the quality, vitality, and strength of the scientific and engineering workforce of the United States. Since 1952, the program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students who are pursuing full-time research-based master's and doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, including STEM education. NSF GRFP was established to recruit and support individuals who demonstrate the potential to make significant contributions in STEM, including STEM education.

Lauren Palermo’s proposal is titled "Mapping the Landslide Built-Up Interface: How Evolving Human Settlement Creates Exposure to Landslides across the U.S." Lauren is the lead author of the USGS National Landslide Damages and Losses open dataset.

Danielle’s research leverages global satellite data to map trends in wildland fire behavior. She is reimagining fundamental fire science by testing theoretical relationships at continental scales. By fusing multi-scale, multi-temporal observations, she aims to understand the connection between fire speed, intensity, duration, and the socio-ecological outcomes of extreme fire events.

Emily’s research investigates how rising temperatures are impacting forest recovery after wildfire in the Southern Rocky Mountains. With increasing fire activity in the US Mountain West and hotter, drier climatic conditions, her work aims to synthesize field and remotely sensed data on recovery over the last several decades. Particularly, she aims to understand potential areas vulnerable to non-recovery, such as trailing edge forests.

Nyika Campbell, is currently working with Dr. Sisimac Duchicela's Mountain Ecology and Biogeography Lab (Mt. Bio) investigating change in alpine plant communities throughout the Americas. Nyika will continue this work as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow with the Mt. Bio lab beginning a masters degree with the CU Geography department in the Fall of 2026. Nyika's work aims to develop a framework for understanding and predicting plant community change across continents by using cutting-edge statistical methods to link large-scale satellite datasets to existing field-based observations. Prior to her current position as a Lab Manager at CU Nyika served for four years as an ecology field crew leader with the Rocky Mountain and Pacific Southwest research stations of the U.S. Forest Service.

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Nykia Campbell

Four Geography Graduate Students are Awarded the GRFP, Setting Campus Record!

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