“The projects this year run the gamut, from fungus and bats, to lichens to blue-green algae, to an invasive tick, to evolution in lichens, to pollination trials, back to bats and how they are affected by light, and finally diversity in forests,” summarized Thomas Daniels, Ph.D., director of the Louis Calder Center, in his opening remarks. 

In 20-minute-long presentations, seven Fordham students spoke about what it was like to explore the sprawling 113-acre biological field station through CSUR: a 21-year-old program that allows Fordham undergraduates to conduct independent research projects with a Fordham faculty member and a $5,000 stipend. In wooded areas, Ian Sokolowski, FCLC ’20, foraged for Asian long-horned ticks with a white corduroy cloth and forceps. In the middle of Calder Lake, Julia Sese, FCRH ’20, retrieved water samples and analyzed algae blooms. 

Several of the students also shared how their projects began. Joseph Laske, FCRH ’21, recalled the day he found a wild bat while cleaning a Harlem park with members of the Students for Environmental Awareness and Justice club at Fordham. 

“I was raking some leaves, and I heard a squeak. I looked down, and there was this bat curled up on the ground in a fetal position,” recalled Laske, an environmental studies student. 

Concerned about the wild creature’s well-being, Laske snapped a picture of the animal and sent it to his professor, Craig Frank, Ph.D., who studies the effect of white-nose syndrome in bats. Could this bat be affected by the same disease, Laske wondered? 

It wasn’t. But his email sparked a conversation with Frank that would lead to Laske’s application to the CSUR program. For 10 weeks, Laske looked at how white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease, grows at different temperatures and how one species in particular, the Eastern small-footed bat, is able to resist the dangerous disease. 

“Bats are important pollinators [and pest eaters]. They contribute a huge amount to the agricultural industry,” said Laske, who plans on working as a technician in Frank’s lab this fall. 

The keynote address delivered by Alexandria Moore, Ph.D., a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History and adjunct professor at Columbia University, also explored science research. Most of her speech spotlighted her work in coastal wetland restoration. But the rest focused on her identity as a queer person of color and how it informs her work as a scientist. 

“What I have talked about so far today has been sort of referencing gaps: The first one is a gap in our knowledge of how ecosystems work and how we can do a good job at recovering them; the other one is a gap in our understanding of the differences between people and the importance of those differences that people have,” Moore said. “What I do now in my work is combine all of those things together …. What I do at the museum is I ask the same kinds of research questions that I asked at Yale. I ask them in areas where we haven’t asked them with people who never really get to be part of those conversations.”

Sitting in the audience were eight local high school students in Fordham’s Science and Technology Entry Program (STEP)—an academic enrichment program for underrepresented youth from 7th to 12th grade—who presented their summer research posters that afternoon. 

The year before was the first time that STEP students participated in the program. One member of the inaugural cohort will be a first-year student at Fordham College at Lincoln Center this fall, said Patricio Meneses, Ph.D., who helped bring the students to the annual program. 

For DaiJon James, a rising senior at Equality Charter High School in the Bronx, the six-week research experience clarified his career path. It showed him that he wants to become a scientist—a first for his family, he said. But what surprised him this summer was the level of respect and collaboration that he experienced with his Fordham mentors, including Rachel Annunziato, Ph.D. 

“It was kind of like …  jarring because as a teenager, you don’t ever really expect to be given the kind of opportunity to show what you know,” said James, who studied how to best use teletherapy to improve post-procedure care for teenagers with liver transplants. “Working with Dr. Annunziato changed that perspective for me.” 

This summer, another student—Alexa Caruso, a rising senior at New Rochelle High School in Westchester County—performed data collection and analysis on perovskites, a promising material in solar cell research. 

“With the people and the resources that we now have in this day and age, we can definitely make something useful,” Caruso said. “What I did, it’s gonna help the future one day.” 

At a luncheon held on the front porch of Calder Hall, the Gatsby-esque mansion perched on a 680-foot-high bluff just 25 miles north of New York City, students, faculty, and staff took stock of all the scientific research that has been conducted at the center since its founding in August, 1967. The afternoon celebration also honored the legacy of the Calder family, which was represented by Louis Calder’s grandson Peter Calder.

A Shared Commitment to the Natural World

A year before the center was established, the estate of paper magnate Louis Calder deeded the property—then known as Rockmoor Estate—to Fordham, with the understanding that the “premises will be used primarily as a reserve for the study of the natural environment and other fields of ecology.”

Speaking to the group of about 50 faculty members, students and staff, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, said the research conducted at Calder—more than 200 Ph.D.s and master’s degrees have been awarded to students whose work was based there—is crucial to solving some of the most vexing problems of our time, such as climate change.

Related: A Day In the Wildlife: Amid the Ecosystems and Ecologist at the Calder Center

He noted that Calder staff and students are following in the footsteps of early Jesuits who were committed to learning about the natural world, and who reported their findings back to the Superior General of the Society of Jesus. One of them, Georg Joseph Kamel, S.J., a 17th-century pharmacist who made medicines from plants, is credited as the namesake of the Camellia flower, he said.

“Everything flowed to Rome, and on the basis of this, younger Jesuits were trained using what they had learned. So, we have in our blood this interest and delight in everything in the world, especially the world of nature,” he said.

“Every day that Calder is active, open, and making discoveries, you deepen our University’s connection to these Jesuit roots.”

Father McShane cited Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical on the environment and sustainable development, Laudato Si, as a present-day manifestation of that commitment to the natural world.

“In one of his most important addresses to the world, [Pope Francis] holds up for all the world with all the moral authority he can muster the needs of our common home, the world. As he holds up the needs of our common home, he points to exactly the work you do here,” he said.

‘A Conservationist of His Day’

In a presentation about the history of the property, Tom Daniels, Ph.D., director of the Calder Center, described Louis Calder’s career and the way he used the estate. He displayed several photographs, including one image of Calder and a hunting party.

“Hunting and fishing were very important to him. He was a conservationist of his day. We don’t necessarily think of conservation now as hunting and fishing, particularly in the Northeast, but sportsman, hunters, and fishermen had great respect for the land and the resources. It showed in his work at [paper company]Perkins Goodwin, and it showed in his handling of this property,” he said.

Supporting Undergraduate Research

Daniels also announced that the Calder Foundation had just contributed $210,000 toward an endowment that supports the Calder Summer Undergraduate (CSUR) program, which hosts undergraduate students doing research over the summer. The program, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary, currently hosts five students; the Calder gift will enable it to host two more.

Father McShane dubbed the Calders “exemplary companions in mission and colleagues in service.”

Addressing Peter Calder, he said, “Your family and the foundation gave us all of this, and you gave with it a mission to learn, to preserve, and to be evangelical about ecology preservation. We could never adequately thank you and your entire family enough.”

In acknowledging Father McShane’s thanks, Calder stood up from his front row seat, turned around and delivered impromptu remarks to the assembled group.

“The family appreciates all of your comments, but it’s really Fordham and its people that have made this a success. And I thank you for that,” he said.

50 Years Later, a Very Different Place

A running theme of the day was how much has changed since 1967. The aviary, outdoor swimming pool and “toboggan run” are long gone. Labs and classrooms have been constructed in Calder Hall and the Lake House, and a residence hall and a new greenhouse have been built in the last five years.

A primary driver behind much of that change was John Wehr, Ph.D., professor of biological sciences, who was director of the center for 30 years before stepping aside in 2014. He was honored at the presentation for all his contributions, including founding the CSUR program 20 years ago.

Daniels summed up the three main tenets of the center’s mission: understand the world we live in, show people nature so that they ascribe value to it; and make new scientists.

“We still have much to do. We have real science we have to do,” he said. “With the people we currently have at the EPA, environmental stewardship has never been more important.”

“Oftentimes people follow the traditional path of medicine and nothing else, but I wanted to explore where my other talents and interests lied, beyond this medical barrier,” said Karakaya, a rising senior with a double major in biology and philosophy.

At the 2017 Calder Summer Undergraduate Research (CSUR) Symposium, held at the Louis Calder Center on Aug. 4, Karakaya and four other undergraduates in the CSUR program got the opportunity to share scientific research they worked on in the fields of ecology, conservation, and evolution.

Karakaya examined the fungal composition of the soil in undisturbed and disturbed woodlands of Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx to see if fungi were helping to restore sites that were disturbed by human interference, invasive species, and drought.

“If we better understand these communities of fungus in the soil that aid in the prospering of these plants, maybe we could apply that to microorganisms in the human intestines to help people with gastrointestinal issues,” she said.  “I think a lot of answers are already present in nature, but we don’t look to it as often as we should.”

For Joseph Gross, a rising senior who presented research on the effectiveness of catnip essential oil in repelling ticks, an understanding of how the popular herbal oil works to deter pests can improve public health.

“Lyme disease has been increasing over the years, and as we see more cases, it’s become a research focus to try and develop new methods,[other]than what we’ve been using,” he said.

Rising senior Linelle Abueg, teamed up with biologist Jason Munshi-South, Ph.D. associate professor of biology, for an exploratory study of genomes New York City brown rats to identify areas in their DNA where they might differ from other rats.

Other students were focused on conservation.

Lauren Beglin, FCRH ’19, jumped at the chance to work with Craig Frank, Ph.D., associate professor of biology, on a study on the effect of cutaneous lipid composition on the growth of the fungus P. destructans. That fungus is the causative agent of White-Nose Syndrome, which has killed millions of bats over the past decade.

“Bats are such a critical part of our ecosystem,” she said. “They perform an estimated $22 billion worth of agricultural pest control, and they’re a major consumer of mosquitos.  They’re an important population of species that I’d like to see preserved in this area because our ecosystem benefits from them.”

As climate change continues to be a hot topic in science and politics, Connor Gilligan, a rising senior, said his evolutionary biology study on the effects of severe drought on California’s Brassica rapa plant may provide a unique perspective on the contentious issue.

“People can be resistant to the realities of climate change, and I think this really reinforces that indeed the climate is changing,” he said. “It’s important to see how different organism are contending with this.”

Over the course of the 10-week program, the students “lived, ate, and breathed” science, and it showed in each of their presentations, said Thomas J. Daniels, Ph.D., director of the Calder Center and co-director of its Vector Ecology Laboratory.

“We’re trying to make new ecologists,” he said. “That’s what the CSUR represents.

It’s a very hands-on, motivating opportunity for students to be introduced to science research at a level that they wouldn’t normally get as undergraduate students.”

Sarah Whorley, GSAS ’16, the keynote speaker of the symposium, said she hoped the students would be inspired to bring science engagement opportunities to the public.

“In normal, everyday conversations about sciences, we need to move away from jargon,” said Whorley, an assistant professor of biology at Daeman College.

“It’s important to train scientists and educators to not only be able to have that high-level conversation, but to reach new scientists and get more people involved and interested by being linguistically accessible.”

The 2017 Calder Summer Undergraduate Research (CSUR) Symposium was sponsored by the Louis Calder Center and supported by the National Science Foundation. 

The all-day event featured a keynote address by Sarwan Dhir, Ph.D., program director of the Center for Biotechnology at Fort Valley State University. “You have worked really hard,” Dhir told the students. “This was just a seed for you—it’s up to you to grow now.”

The Calder Summer Undergraduate Research (CSUR) Program, which has been held at Fordham’s Louis Calder Center Biological Field Station in Armonk since 1998, is a highly selective 12-week initiative that attracts students from across the country to conduct research under the mentorship of Fordham ecology faculty members. Participating students have access to study sites at the station and nearby ecosystems, such as the Hudson River, the Catskill Mountains and Black Rock Forest.

The students ranged from Texas A&M University in College Station, Tex., to Medger Evers College in Brooklyn. Funding for the program is provided by a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates Site Program.

John Wehr, Ph.D., associate professor and director of the Calder Center, and James Lewis, Ph.D., associate professor of biology, direct the program. “As opposed to being told about science, they’re doing science,” Wehr said. “By the end of the summer, their hard work results in some excellent science. This was a very enthusiastic group of students.”

The students each delivered 20-minute presentations about their research on topics ranging from ectomycorrhizal fungi to negative geotaxis in rice and maize weevils.