Julia Prins was recognized with the North Carolina Botanical Garden’s Best Student Oral Presentation at the 2025 Association of Southeastern Biologists’ annual meeting. The award was presented by Brandon Wheeler, the botanical garden’s conservation ecologist. Photo courtesy of Dr. Gretchen Potts.
Julia Prins arrived on the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga campus in early 2021 seeking a fresh start after a less-than-stellar initial collegiate experience.
Five years later, she’s about to leave UTC with two degrees, multiple academic awards and a clear purpose: to protect the ecosystems she has loved since childhood.
Prins, who will receive a master’s degree in environmental science in May, was recently recognized with the North Carolina Botanical Garden’s Best Student Oral Presentation award at the 2025 Association of Southeastern Biologists’ annual meeting.
Her award-winning presentation, “Modeling NatureServe Subnational Conservation Status Ranks for Tennessee Vascular Plants,” was one of two talks she gave at the meeting. She also co-presented “A Vascular Flora of a Historically African American Recreation Area, Booker T. Washington State Park in Hamilton County, Tennessee,” alongside fellow graduate student Sevyn Brothers.
For Prins, the honor was both gratifying and deeply meaningful.
“I spent so many hours working on this project—late nights almost every single day for the last two years,” she said. “It’s really great to be recognized for all that hard work, but it’s also important for getting my research out there so more people can hear about it and learn from it.”
The honor marked the second consecutive year Prins was recognized for her research on Tennessee’s plant species, following a 2024 award from the Southern Appalachian Botanical Society.
Julia Prins
Originally from Minneapolis, Prins began college as a civil engineering major at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. However, when COVID-19 forced students home in 2020, she reassessed her direction.
“I realized I didn’t want to go back to L.A. or keep studying engineering,” she said. “I reignited my passion for the outdoors that summer—camping, hiking—something I remembered loving to do as a 10-year-old kid. It clicked that this was what I wanted to do: protect natural areas and work in conservation.”
Prins said that she “Googled environmental science programs” and UTC came up. She had visited Chattanooga once as a kid and “I really liked the area but didn’t really know much other than that.”
“So I went on a limb and applied for school here,” she continued, “and then a couple of months later I started going to UTC without even touring the campus. It’s been one of my best decisions. I love Chattanooga, I love environmental science and I have loved going to school here at UTC.”
Shortly before earning her bachelor’s degree in environmental science in 2023, Prins approached UTAA Distinguished Service and UC Foundation Professor Joey Shaw about entering UTC’s master’s program.
“When she came to me as an undergraduate, Julia told me she wanted to work and do something important for plant conservation—but she had very little plant training,” Shaw said. “The funny thing was that she told me she wanted to work in my lab—but she hadn’t taken any of my classes. I really didn’t know who she was.”
Prins laughed when explaining why she hadn’t taken Shaw’s classes.
“I heard they were hard,” she said. “Prior to talking to him, I had only taken one dendrology class—a tree class—as an undergrad, but I did a lot of research looking into different areas and I discovered I really liked the research side of things.
“I discovered on my own through hiking that I really enjoyed seeing plants. I’d stop and look at a plant, a flower, a tree or whatever I was passing by—and that made me realize that that’s what I was interested in.”
Prins said she has always been interested in protecting the environment.
“Plants are such key central aspects of our ecosystems,” she said. “By working to protect plants, I can also help to protect our ecosystems in general, protect our habitats, and protect the animals and other life that rely on plants for their survival.
“That’s when I decided to talk to Joey Shaw. Luckily, he decided to take me on even without having any plant knowledge.”
Shaw said, “She hit the ground running and her strengths just took off from there.”
“I reignited my passion for the outdoors that summer—camping, hiking—something I remembered loving to do as a 10-year-old kid,” Julia Prins said. “It clicked that this was what I wanted to do: protect natural areas and work in conservation.” Photos courtesy of Julia Prins.
Prins’ master’s thesis work focused on assessing the extinction risk of Tennessee’s plant species. Currently, only about 50% of the state’s flora has an assigned conservation status.
She set out to fill the gap by using modeling to generate subnational conservation status ranks for more than 3,000 vascular plant species in Tennessee under the NatureServe system.
“Through my thesis, I developed this automated way of generating these ranks for species,” said Prins, who successfully defended her master’s thesis in February. “It doesn’t require that long species-by-species assessment process; instead, we can automate it by mapping range, assessing threats automatically so it requires less time. We can rank 3,000 species in a matter of days rather than only a few species, so this allows for a greater impact on plant conservation.”
Shaw said Prins’ modeling work is now under review by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation and may help shape future decisions about development, rare species protections and resource allocation.
“This study is going to make a huge impact,” he said. “It’s not only relevant for science and education, but it gives policymakers new tools to help protect Tennessee’s rarest plant species.”
In addition to the thesis work, Prins developed a manual to help other states implement similar modeling methods—a contribution she hopes will elevate plant conservation efforts nationwide.
A graduate teaching assistant since fall 2023, she also worked as a 2024 summer intern for the Tennessee River Gorge Trust and completed a vascular flora inventory of Booker T. Washington State Park in Chattanooga.
Her next stop? A seasonal position with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
“It’s one of my favorite places,” she said. “I’ll get paid to hike in the woods and look at plants—which is my favorite thing to do.”
Long term, she hopes to work with NatureServe or in another role advancing plant conservation.
“Studying plants is how I contribute to protecting ecosystems,” she said. “If we protect plants, we protect everything that depends on them.”
Reflecting on her journey from California engineering student to award-winning conservation scientist in Tennessee, Prins flashed a big smile.
“Yeah, if someone told me five years ago, ‘You’re going to be living in Tennessee and not doing engineering,’ I wouldn’t have believed them,” she said. “But I think 10-year-old me would have. I’m following the dreams that I had when I was a little kid.”
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In addition to Julia Prins and Sevyn Brothers, other UTC personnel presenting at the Association of Southeastern Biologists’ annual meeting included:
- UTAA Distinguished Service and UC Foundation Professor Joey Shaw (oral presentation): “A History, Summary, and Description of the Vascular Flora of Tennessee”
- Assistant Professor Jannatul Ferdoush (oral presentation): “Identification of biomarker genes in liver and kidney cancer progression: A shared high-throughput and molecular docking approach with potentials for targeted therapeutic interventions”
- Master’s student Meredith Woodward (faculty advisor Joey Shaw, oral presentation): “Levels of Completeness Across Fields of Herbarium Data: An Exploration of Tennessee’s Available Specimen Data”
- Master’s student Andy Wall (faculty advisor Joey Shaw, oral presentation): “Preliminary Vascular Plant Flora of Cloudland Canyon State Park, Dade County, Georgia”
- Meredith Grant (faculty advisor David Giles, poster presentation): “Polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) can alter the killing effects of antimicrobial peptides in Vibrio cholerae”
- Carli Todd (faculty advisor David Giles, poster presentation): “Examining the effects of 29 unique exogenous fatty acids on growth and membrane permeability in Vibrio cholerae”
- Lydia Byerly (faculty advisor David Giles, poster presentation): “Aeromonas hydrophila alters growth, biofilm formation, and swimming motility at host and aquatic temperatures in response to polyunsaturated fatty acids”
- Master’s student James Anderson (faculty advisor Tom Wilson, poster presentation: “Competitive and Predative Interactions of Conspecific Aquatic Larvae in Ephemeral Pools”
- Master’s student Michelle White (faculty advisor Tom Wilson, poster presentation): “Evaluating potential climatic correlates in the range expansion Green Treefrog (Hyla cinerea) across the southeastern United States”
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