Doctoral students reflect on their journeys to becoming Ph.D. candidates and chosen paths of study

Nicholas Corline is investigating how some of the smallest creatures can have a big impact.

“Our research is really saying that when you have these high populations of tadpoles, you create biogeochemical hotspots on the landscape, and these are your sites of elevated nutrient cycling and elevated carbon cycling,” said Corline, a fourth-year Ph.D. student studying forest resources and environment conservation.

Corline is one of 38 students in Virginia Tech’s Doctoral Scholars program who will be presenting their research during a poster symposium. The program’s annual event will be March 29 from 1-4 p.m. in Kelly Hall on the Blacksburg campus.

Led by the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science (ICTAS), the program honors exceptional Ph.D. candidates interested in science and engineering with a competitive graduate fellowship. It currently has 38 students representing the College of Engineering, College of Science, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, and the College of Natural Resources and the Environment. The program is supported by significant contributions from the Virginia Tech Graduate School as well as various Virginia Tech colleges and faculty advisors.

Leading up to the event, Corline and two other scholars — Cecelia Wood, a third year Ph.D. student studying geosciences, and Wesley Woo, a second year student studying computer science — shared their insights about the program, their research, and what they hope to convey on March 29.

Why did you accept the offer to join the Doctoral Scholars program?

Corline: The main thing that made me partial to the fellowship is the idea that I have a lot of flexibility and freedom to explore my own research. I feel like there’s a lot of flexibility for me to go off on tangents and explore things, which are relevant to the project but still out there, without feeling bad about it. There’s also all the support that ICTAS gives – the professional development and a community of scholars – which is cool because it’s really diverse.

Wood: I think that ICTAS, especially within the Doctoral Scholars program, focuses on the intersection between basic scientific research and how we can apply that to society and today’s technology. I think that it was lucky because I see that in my research, and I came to Tech because I was a chemistry major and now I’m in geosciences; I wanted to switch from a basic science to a more applied science. I think it all comes back to that intersection.

Woo: It’s cool to be part of a public institution which has different research goals and funders than a private research institution. It’s really a privilege to not have to worry about funding for a couple years, to have access to ICTAS’s resources, so I can get a travel grant that I’ve used to go to conferences and share my work. 

What do you enjoy most about the program?

Corline: Everyone has a lot of pride in the school – in Virginia Tech itself – and their work. That makes it a fun place to work because everyone’s excited about what they’re doing. That’s the main thing I picked up. 

Wood: I think it’s the camaraderie. All of us have a passion in making sure that our research means something for the world. I talk to some of the scholars who are studying water availability and some who are looking at animal health and resources, and while all of that is different from my research, I think we connect with the passion of wanting to impact the world. What I also really appreciate about the program is the freedom to take risks in my research and pursue leadership opportunities that I wouldn’t have been able to because I don’t have to teach with the fellowship. I’m actually co-leading my own research symposium in my department, so I get to have the hands-on experience planning everything and coordinating committees. 

Woo: It’s honestly the freedom. I’m constantly reminding myself that it’s great not to have to worry about funding either through TA’ing [being a teaching assistant] or research assistant positions. There’s freedom to define my own path and work on problems that I think are important [and explore] work between disciplines and how people are approaching the same problem from different disciplinary backgrounds or angles.

What is the most challenging part of the program?

Corline: The toughest part about the program is that a Ph.D. is such a huge investment in time, and it’s easy to get bogged down in what you’re doing and not feel like you’re going anywhere because you’re accumulating all this knowledge and putting experiments together. That’s the biggest challenge – to not just keep motivated but just to keep going and know that you’re still making progress even when everything seems to be really slow.

Wood: I don’t know if challenging is the right word, but there are a lot of high expectations for us in the program because we were picked to be the best of the best. It’s nice to have high expectations because I like to strive and meet those expectations. We are also encouraged to not just be a good graduate student but to be a good citizen and to get involved. I would say it’s a challenge in the way that you want to receive it and meet it.

Woo: Just learning how to do a Ph.D. in general is challenging, especially because there are so many ways to do good, valid research – so many ways of working or thinking about arguments you want to make. It seems like an individual endeavor of finding your identity as a researcher, figuring out what problems you care about and how to make convincing arguments about these problems and what tools you’re going to use to make these arguments. With the freedom that comes with not having to worry about funding, is also, ‘OK, how should I be spending my time?’ I feel like there’s a lot of great ways to serve the community and learn broadly. A personal outlook I have on pursuing a Ph.D. is that, yes, there are tangible career benefits or technical growth that can come from doing a Ph.D. but also growing as a person, having new experiences, and learning new ways of thinking are all tied up in the process of becoming an independent researcher.   

How would you describe your current research?

Corline: I’m on one large project which is an interdisciplinary shared project between Virginia Tech and the University of Maryland, and it’s out on the Delmarva Peninsula. The overall goal of the project is to understand wetland carbon cycling and nutrient cycling. So like water level in these wetlands, how that changes through time, seasons, or years, or how that might change carbon storage, carbon release, nutrient storage, etc. I also have a strong interest in animal ecology, so I was able to bring how animals affect nutrient carbon cycling within the wetlands in conjunction with hydrology. So I have the hydrology project going on looking at these wetlands, and then I was able to do more of an ecology project coming in there looking at how tadpoles affect nutrient cycling in wetlands and how they’re an important contributor to carbon cycling.

Wood: My research is on heavy metal contamination in fresh water drinking reservoirs. It's close to home because I work with the Western Virginia Water Authority on reservoirs that are in Roanoke. These reservoirs serve as a backup water supply for Roanoke City and Roanoke County. We have the system that we know removes it, but we don’t know a lot about that process of how it gets removed and how much gets removed. So we look at those particles in the water and say, okay, this is the type of mineral which means it has these properties.We try to examine those particles to make our system better so that way we can remove even more from the water column and tell other people about it.

Woo: My main area of research looks at different barriers to internet use and high quality internet infrastructure. These barriers might not always be purely technological. One concept that I've been thinking about recently is social internet use - what are the ways people might rely on others to access the internet? This idea appears a lot in work on internet use in the Global South. But even in the U.S., once we leave home, we don’t have access to our home internet, so we might be using Starbucks' Wi-Fi or Virginia Tech Wi-Fi. Even if we’re at home, we may have bad internet and need to interact with our service provider or rely on other people's networks or cell phone hotspots to reestablish connectivity. I'm wondering how we can take the social nature of internet infrastructure use into account when designing the internet itself.

What are you presenting at the poster symposium? 

Corline: I’m going to be presenting my research on the tadpoles. In that landscape, we have all these different wetlands. There are thousands of these small ponds and some of them host frogs as breeding sites and they have tons of tadpoles in there. Our research is really saying that when you have these high populations of tadpoles, you create biogeochemical hotspots on the landscape and these are your sites of elevated nutrient cycling and elevated carbon cycling. So imagine that you have all these wetlands out there and they’re doing their [own] things. They’re breaking down leaves. They’re storing organic matter. They’re processing nutrients. But then, when you have these tadpole populations in there, it supercharges them, so you have much more breakdown. You have faster nutrient cycling and various effects on microbial activities.  

Wood: I have five years’ worth of data I pulled together. With that data, we can look at how much iron and manganese gets removed every year. We have a test reservoir and a controlled reservoir. The test reservoir has the system, and the control doesn’t, so we have five years’ worth of data that shows our system is effective. It speeds up iron and manganese removal and overall, does what we want it to do which I think is a great response everyone wants to see.

Woo: At the poster session, I'll be presenting ongoing work on the design of future cellular networks. In traditional cellular networks, your phone has one IP address and needs to keep this IP address as you connect to different cell towers. This design makes it difficult to move from one cellular network to another without seeing a significant disruption to your cell phone’s performance, which impedes the spread of smaller, community-owned and operated cellular networks. The work I’m doing now explores how the modern internet no longer needs to rely on this traditional cellular network design, as internet-connected devices can manage their own changing IP addresses more efficiently. If devices can indeed handle mobility by themselves, it will be easier for future internet infrastructure to be owned and operated by the communities it serves.

Some answers were edited and condensed for clarity.