After living in Ecuador for the past year year, Kriddie Whitmore (‘07) is ready to be home.
Whitmore is a grad student and lab manager at UNC-Chapel Hill. After getting her master’s at Virginia Tech, she heard about a grad program in Ecuador.
“The lab got a big grant to do some research in the Páramo [mountains] and was looking for a Ph.D. student so I went back to school,” Whitmore said.
Whitmore researched carbon cycling in the Páramo mountains, a mountain chain in Ecuador.
“It’s just great to have an excuse to go out, enjoy this landscape, and think about it really deep,” she said. “I have all the data that I want and now I’m writing papers.”
Whitmore’s done other fieldwork, too. In Virginia, she studied the pollutants that would accumulate in the runoff around a coal mine.
“I was looking at trace elements that would bioaccumulate in rivers that would run off of coal mining land,” she said.
Closer to home, Whitmore worked on a project that looked at streams going into Jordan Lake and relating it to the larger lake population, specifically looking at nitrogen pollution.
Now she’s working on her dissertation, and getting ready to work.
“I think I’d be the most excited to work at a government agency,” Whitmore said.
When Whitmore was at Riverside, she played field hockey. She remembers her coaches fondly.
“I was on the field hockey team,” she said. “That was a big part of my life. I remember going to practice on the softball field.”
Although the administration is almost entirely different, the signoff the principals use seems to stay pretty consistent.
“Mr. Key would say on the speaker every day ‘Roll pirates roll,’“ she said.
