Scientist Siblings • Maggie Parrish

(Forest Resources & Conservation Graduate Student, University of Florida || FL USA)

“I started scientific research in third grade with the science fair. It’s like a mini thesis — you can research anything you want. When you’re in elementary school it’s just little fun projects, but once you get to middle and high school, the projects get really complex! I attended the International Science Fair three times. There were 1500 competitors from 70 countries, so for a high schooler who’s never been to a conference before, it’s the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen. The project I worked on in high school came about when I saw a TED talk on bioluminescence. But sadly, no one at the University of South Florida studies bioluminescence, so I got in touch with a microbiology professor to work in her lab. The idea was to create a portable kit to test water for enterococci bacteria. The current equipment is very expensive and stationary — you have to get water samples to a lab in three hours, which doesn’t work for water that’s more than three hours away! So I designed a $300 portable test kit — much cheaper than the $10,000 lab equipment — and it worked just as well.

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My brothers are also in STEM fields, and about two years ago, we heard about the National Geographic early career explorer grants. I was in undergrad at the time studying Environmental Science, and we wanted to use the grant to fund a multidisciplinary project across our fields. It was so cool because we could do it as a family. We were awarded the grant to create 3D maps from 2D images to identify changes in ecosystems over time. We spent five days in Grand Teton National Park collecting data and it was incredible. I hope to go back in five years to see how the ecosystem has evolved. The time in the mountains showed me that I definitely want to do field research in the future!

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From my STEM experiences, I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter how much you know or what skills you have now — you don’t have to be a genius! If you can adapt and be persistent, you will learn the skills that you need to get you where you want to go.”