By Yuyang Wang ’24
Staff Writer
On Aug. 1, the Mount Holyoke College Miller Worley Center for the Environment welcomed Dr. Angelica Patterson as the new curator of education and outreach.
According to Christian Feuerstein, director of news and media relations at Mount Holyoke, “Patterson received her bachelor’s in natural resources from Cornell University and her masters, master of philosophy and doctorate degrees from Columbia University in plant ecophysiology.” According to a recent interview with Dr. Patterson for Mount Holyoke News, she worked at Barnard College as a research assistant in a plant lab and as an administrator in its Environmental Science Department for seven years before coming to Mount Holyoke. Patterson said she loved this work and was inspired by the feeling of being immersed in a community of passionate students eager to lead progressive changes in their fields. “When I saw the opportunity to once again work and collaborate amongst inspiring young leaders again, I leaped at the chance,” Patterson said.
“When I saw the opportunity to once again work and collaborate amongst inspiring young leaders again, I leaped at the chance.”
When discussing her main responsibilities as the curator of education and outreach, Patterson said, “I will be responsible for the development and implementation of curricular opportunities for the Center, including the Campus Living Laboratory. This will involve outreach with and general coordination among departments, instructors, classes, MHC organizations and public audiences.” Patterson said a central goal for her work is “to broaden MWCE’s reach across campus and the local community, which will first entail communicating our mission and the resources we have that can be creatively used to support various classrooms and organizations as well as independent projects and learning experiences. I envision the development of larger projects that can better integrate environmental data into the classroom, establish community science opportunities across the Campus Living Lab and utilize more innovative technology in the teaching of environmental sciences.”
Outside of her role at the MWCE, Patterson described her background in plant science with a focus in plant ecophysiology, which she described as “the study of the physiology of plants and their responses to changes in environmental conditions.” According to Feuerstein, Patterson studies trees’ adaptation to global warming.
As she reflected on why she chose this field, Patterson said she was inspired by a paper she read during graduate school at Columbia University. “We read a paper by Richard Pearson called ‘Climate change and the migration capacity of species.’ In the paper, they noted that the percentage of species ‘committed to extinction’ using climate change projections for 2050 was around 21-23 percent with unlimited dispersal with the percentage going as high as 38-52 percent if they had no ability to disperse.” She went on to explain that although plants are immobile organisms, they can still migrate via seed dispersal. While plant distributions across the world have been changing since the beginning of time, rapidly warming climates result in plants migrating up to ten times faster than they did before in order to survive. “I was interested in learning how trees in the Northeastern United States were responding to warmer temperatures and see if there was a physiological mechanism behind their responses and if those responses differed between plants that had historically different geographic range distributions (northern vs. central vs. southern ranged trees),” Angelica said.
Currently, her research involves measuring the photosynthetic and respiration rates of leaves. Usually, the leaves she wants to study are on the high top of the forest canopy, so she has had to come up with a way to collect these leaf samples. She explained that she “would go into the field and use a shotgun to shoot branches down from the top of the canopy. These leaves are usually growing in full sunlight, so by sampling canopy level branches, we could reduce the amount of variation we would find in their physiological responses to experimental treatments.”
Feuerstein explained that this practice “... led The Guardian to dub her ‘the shotgun scientist’ in a 2020 article.”
Patterson went on to describe the results of this process. “In summary, we found that northern ranged trees had the highest rates of respiration (or carbon loss) under elevated temperatures, whereas the central ranged trees, such as the red oak, had similar rates of respiration to southern ranged trees as temperatures elevated.” Patterson explained that these findings mean that central ranged trees — such as the red oak — may be at a disadvantage when it comes to sustaining reproduction and growth as the climate warms due to climate change.
This emotional connection to the forest is one of her reasons for coming to work at Mount Holyoke. When asked about her favorite place on campus, she answered,“I would be remiss if I did not mention the natural spaces that make a part of the Campus Living Laboratory as one of the most resourceful and favorite places at MHC. I especially enjoy the trails through Prospect Hill [among] the trees — a forested area, which always brings me peace and joy.”