2020 Graduate Rosy Glos wins Merrill Presidential Scholarship

Huge congratulations to Rosy Glos for being named as a 2020 Merrill Presidential Scholar. Rosy is one of 35 students at Cornell to receive this prestigious award, highlighting her place in the top 1% of graduating seniors. Since 1988, the Merrill Presidential Scholars Program has honored Cornell University’s most outstanding graduating seniors, while also recognizing the teachers who have played a significant role in ensuring their success. Each scholar selected is given an opportunity to recognize the high school teacher who most inspired their scholastic development and the Cornell faculty member who most significantly contributed to their college experience. In a normal year, we’d be celebrating Rosy at a lovely convocation ceremony in which both the faculty member (me!!!) and Rosy’s botany high school teacher, David Streib, from New Roots School would be present.  One of the amazing aspects of the Merrill Scholarship is the direct way in which Rosy will now be giving back to her community: A STAR (Special Teachers Are Recognized) Scholarship will be named in honor of David Streib, awarded to a Cornell student with financial need from Rosy’s hometown.

Click here for more information about the Merrill Presidential Scholarship Program and the 2020 cohort of scholars.

Rosy worked on two fundamental research projects in the Specht Lab:  she first worked with Erika Styger in IP-CALS and traveled to Suriname to meet with farmers and collect rice seed in order to investigate links between genotype and phenotype in cultivated rice of the Sa’amaka people; then switched gears to complete an honors thesis in collaboration with NSF Postdoctoral Fellow Shayla Salzman, characterizing diversity and evolution of leaf anatomical traits across the cycad genus Zamia.  For her senior thesis project, Rosy travelled to the Montgomery Botanical Center and Fairchild Botanical Gardens (Miami, Florida) to collect, preserve, section, and stain leaf material from their living collections.  Rosy continues to stain and image Zamia leaves from her home base on Kingbird Farm located just southeast of Ithaca NY.