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Major: Biology

Profession: Ph.D. student at Princeton's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

What are you doing now?

Charlotte Chang is a graduate student at Princeton University in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She is a conservation scientist and quantitative ecologist, combining field work in Southwest China and Southeast Asia alongside mathematical models to better understand how to combat illegal resource extraction.

How did you get there?

“After I graduated from Pomona, I volunteered as a field technician for Point Blue Conservation performing marine mammal and seabird surveys at Vandenberg Air Force base. I was lucky to be funded by the Pomona-Downing student exchange scholarship, and had a great time meeting scientists from around the world and conducting research in the Zoology Department at Cambridge. The chance to earn my masters on a scholarship was a great opportunity and I highly recommend this and other post-graduate fellowships to current Sagehens.

Subsequently, I was a Fulbright Fellow in China. Pomona’s fellowships office was a fantastic resource throughout the application process and I was grateful that they were willing to help an alum! During my Fulbright, I met young conservation scientists in China and Asia, and was able to run a field project studying the breeding success of salt marsh songbirds. These postgraduate experiences helped shape my research interests and made me more confident about going to graduate school; in many ecology graduate degree programs, it helps to have previous research experience and in particular, experience managing your own field project.”

How did Pomona prepare you?

“Pomona provided amazing research opportunities for myself and other students. From my first year onwards, I was able to get summer funding to conduct research on and off campus. My thesis advisors, Professors Andre Cavalcanti and Nina Karnovsky, inspired my passion to become a research scientist. Andre taught me how to use programming to answer evolutionary biology questions. Nina trained me as a field biologist. Both were outstanding mentors, as were other professors such as Jo Hardin, Clarissa Cheney, Jonathan Wright, Ami Radunskaya, and Fran Hanzawa. I owe a tremendous amount to these faculty for their hands-on teaching and close guidance. In grad school, many of my friends came from large research universities. The relative difficulty they experienced applying for research positions as undergrads has made me even more grateful for my time at Pomona.”

Where do you see yourself in five years?

“In five years, I plan to continue conducting research that can inform useful management policies in the developing world, seeking to resolve conflicts between economic development and conservation.”