Center for Great Plains Studies awards student grants for 2005

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Center for Great Plains Studies, an interdisciplinary study center, awarded grants this spring to 16 graduate students at UNL, the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and the University of Nebraska at Kearney.

Graduate students from UNK receiving grants were Adrienne Cooper and Eric Reed; from UNO, Joel Jorgensen, Tracy Patton, and Nichollette Rider; and from UNL, Phillip Dobesh, Matthew Douglass, Timothy Huntington, Rebecca Kline, Tamara Levi, Chenhong Li, Jody Lieske, Meredith Marko, Heidi Lynn Puckett, Wynne Summers, and Donna Woudenberg.

* Cooper, a master's student in biology from Milburn, Okla., studies whether soft-shelled turtles eat more introduced mosquitofish than native plains topminnow.

* Dobesh, a master's student in wildlife management from Columbus, received a grant to support his study on how the American burying beetle is affected by loss of habitat in the Nebraska National Forest at Halsey.

* Douglass is a master's student in anthropology and archaeology from Lincoln. He assesses human activity and prehistoric land use in the middle Niobrara River basin through the study of chipped stone remains.

* Huntington is a master's student in forensic entomology from Lincoln. He investigates the occurrence and frequency of multi-generational colonies of blow flies on animal remains.

* Jorgensen of Blair is a master's student in biology. His research is on the stopover ecology of the buff-breasted sandpiper in the Nebraska rainwater basin.

* Kline received a grant to support her study on substance use among Latino immigrants in rural Nebraska. She is working on a master's degree in family studies.

* Levi, a Ph.D. student in history from Georgia, studies how the control of food and rations by colonial governments affected indigenous peoples.

* Li is a Ph.D. student in systematic biology from Shanghai, China, who investigates the conservation genetics of the plains topminnow (Fundulus sciadicus).

* Lieske is a Ph.D. student in school psychology from Lincoln whose research on Latino communities in central Nebraska examines the peer victimization of children through their adjustment in school.

* Marko, a Ph.D. student in communication studies, studies how parents teach internationally adopted children about their birth culture.

* Patton is a master's student in biology from Omaha who studies the conservation of massasauga (Sistrurus catenatus), a small rattlesnake that inhabits remnant tallgrass prairie in Nebraska.

* Puckett is a master's student in natural resource sciences from Blair who is studying how shelterbelts provide habitat protection for a wide range of bird species.

* Reed is a master's student in English from Hemingford whose research is on fiction in American family periodicals from 1890-1917.

* Rider is working on a master's in conservation biology. She is looking at the cumulative effects of transgenic herbicide tolerant soybeans on plant and butterfly diversity.

* Summers, a Ph.D. student of Plains and Native American literature from Lincoln, researches Omaha Indian place names and how the Omaha tribe of Nebraska has been able to reclaim and maintain its ancestral land.

* Woudenberg, a Lincoln native, is working on a Ph.D. in natural resources from a human perspective through her research on the perception of drought in the Great Plains and its related sociological impacts.

The center's scholarship committee, which included UNL faculty Stephen Lavin, Tala Awada and Nicholas Spencer, and William Pratt from UNO, served as judges for the grants.

For more information, contact James Stubbendieck or Gretchen Walker, Center for Great Plains Studies at (402) 472-3082 or cgps@unl.edu.

CONTACT: James Stubbendieck, Director, Center for Great Plains Studies, (402) 472-3082