UTC graduate student Thomas Wiegand in the Plant Ecology Lab in Grote Hall. Photo by Angela Foster.
Thomas Wiegand planted the seeds for his latest accolade a year ago.
In March 2021, Wiegand—a University of Tennessee at Chattanooga graduate student pursuing a master’s degree in environmental science—was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
The five-year fellowship recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in NSF-supported STEM subjects at accredited U.S. institutions.
A graduate research assistant in Guerry Professor Jennifer Boyd’s environmental science lab, Wiegand has been studying ecological and evolutionary drivers of plant rarity with a current focus on rare, native sunflower species.
That research has others taking notice.
Wiegand has been awarded the Garden Club of America’s Catherine H. Beattie Fellowship in Conservation Horticulture, a national fellowship given to two students a year for research at a botanical garden that supports the mission of the Center for Plant Conservation and the student’s academic program.
The Catherine H. Beattie Fellowship in Conservation Horticulture was created to promote the conservation of rare and endangered flora in the U.S. It was established to honor former Garden Club of America President Catherine H. Beattie.
The fellowship provides one annual research grant of up to $4,500 to study at a botanical garden.
“I applied for the award because of the opportunity to get funding for my research this summer,” said Wiegand, a native of Knoxville. “The nature provides exposure and opportunities for students working in research with both the Center for Plant Conservation and the Garden Club of America.
“It’s a lot of great exposure as a student because these are two huge groups for conservation in the U.S.”
Wiegand, a former Brock Scholar and ReSEARCH Dialogues alum as a UTC undergraduate, received bachelor’s degrees in both environmental science and French language and culture in December 2020.
In 2019, Wiegand and another undergrad researcher, Braley Gentry, used the on-campus ReSEARCH Dialogues conference as a springboard. Accompanied by Boyd, the two went on to present that summer on “Using Network Analysis to Visualize connectivity in Ecology Concepts—An Exploration of Research on Species Rarity” at the World Congress on Undergraduate Research at Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg in Germany.
Wiegand’s current graduate school research involves collaborating with Boyd and the State Botanical Garden of Georgia’s Jennifer Cruse-Sanders and Will Rogers. The State Botanical Garden of Georgia is a 313-acre site operated by the University of Georgia.
Wiegand said the NSF research goes hand-in-hand with the type of work the Garden Club of America and the Center for Plant Conservation were looking to support through the Beattie Fellowship.
He explained that his research involves growing rare and common plants that are closely related, side-by-side, in an experimental setting. The plants are subjected to different conditions meant to mimic some of the challenges they might face in the wild.
“The vast majority of my undergraduate and grad school research has been focused on rare plant species of the Southeast,” he said, “and how we can research ways that they might be able to acclimate to changes in the environment that are usually associated with climate change or human impacts because of agriculture or land-use change or habitat destruction.”
In applying for the Beattie Fellowship, Wiegand referenced his work as measuring growth plasticity in response to light in two rare asters: Helianthus verticillatus and H. longifolius.
In layman’s terms, that plasticity is the ability of an organism—not just plants but other species, too—to adjust to changes in the environment based on whatever genetic factors are at play, Wiegand said.
“I’m working with a few species of sunflower,” he said. “The two that are the focus of this fellowship are very rare sunflowers that are native to a few areas of either Georgia and Alabama or Tennessee and Mississippi.
“We’re subjecting these plants in an experimental setting to both sun and shade treatments. We see how different traits about their growth or reproduction differ across the entirety of the experiment.”
Before he departs to Athens, Georgia, in May for what has now become Beattie Fellowship-sponsored summer research, Wiegand is winding up his experimental work in the Grote Hall Plant Ecology Lab, germinating seeds and completing a lot of prep work.
“It’s been a very productive year,” Wiegand said before thanking the different groups supporting his research endeavors. “It’s surreal for a student to be young, working towards this goal and knowing that these three major organizations are behind what I’m doing.”
