Is to begin her second year at the University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill. She lives in Memphis and originally graduated from White Station High School. For three years she led their high school Garden Club and started their seed library. She founded the school Bee Keeping Club and helped the school achieve designation as a level two Urban Forestry Arboretum. She has worked with some of our Master Gardeners over the years and is an avid follower of Dr. Chris Cooper’s “Family Plot”. At UNC she is currently in the Honors College and the Environmental Society and the very select Chancellor’s Science Scholars Program. Her major is Environmental Science and Biology with a goal of achieving her academic PhD in Agriculture. Of special note, Kate is an inventor with a patent pending in a “solar-powdered small beehive beetle zapper” and a co-creator of “Plant Map USA” app which suggests specific plants for various temperature zones. Currently she is a lab assistant for the Dendrochronology Lab studying pinyon juniper communities and a Fungal Biology Lab studying microbial bacteria within duckweed. These studies and opportunities she states, hopefully, will carry over into graduate school and the study of botany and plant conservation techniques. She has been selected to further explore these topics at the Highland Center Field Site this fall semester and will apply this scholarship money to help cover her research there.