UH Hilo students participate in Ivy League collaboration

Three students from the master’s program in tropical conservation biology and environmental science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo will go to Cornell University to complete their research as part of the “Cornell-Hawaiʻi Graduate Field Research Laboratory.”

Ambyr Mokiao-Lee, Kainana Francisco, and Troy Sakihara joined a group of 14 Ph.D. students from Cornell’s tropical field ecology course in January to collect data for their projects on the wiliwili ecology and anchialine pond hydrology in West Hawaiʻi. They will spend two weeks in April at the Cornell campus in Ithaca, New York, to prepare their data for publication.

The student collaboration program was initiated by Dr. Matt Hamabata, executive director of the Kohala Center, Dr. Jed Sparks, associate professor at Cornell, Gail Makuakane-Lundin, director of UH Hilo’s Kipuka Native Hawaiian Student Center, and Dr. Misaki Takabayashi, UH Hilo associate professor of marine science.

Funding was provided by a UH Hilo Center for Research Excellence in Science and Technology grant from the National Science Foundation.