Walter Poleman

Director of the Field Naturalist Program

An FN graduate himself, Walter is the program director and teaches Fundamentals of Field Science in the fall and Landscape Inventory and Assessment in the spring, using the classic Field Naturalist "layer cake" approach to ecology. He is the co-coordinator of the Greater Burlington Sustainability Education Network. He also coordinates the Rubenstein School’s dual master’s degree program with Vermont Law School and teaches ecology there each summer.

Sonia DeYoung

Assistant Director of the Field Naturalist Program

Sonia leads the discussion seminar portion of Fundamentals of Field Science. Much of her other work happens behind the scenes, where she helps to recruit and orient new students and keep the program running. Elsewhere in the department, she works on projects ranging from experimental research on poplar trees to exhibits of the university’s natural history collections. She graduated from the FN Program in 2017. Outdoors, she enjoys birding by ear.

Cathy Paris

Botany Instructor, Field Naturalist Program

Cathy teaches Field Botany, a fast-paced course designed to acquaint FN students with the diversity of vascular plant species in Vermont and the organization of those species into natural communities. Since 1991, she has taught a variety of courses at UVM in field botany, plant systematics, and plant evolution. Her particular loves are walking in the woods, getting to know new plants and landscapes, and sharing good food and music with friends.

Alicia Daniel

Practicum Instructor, Field Naturalist Program

Walking through the forest without knowing how to read the landscape is like walking through a library without knowing how to read a book. Forests record their histories in rock formations, tree rings, cellar holes, and beaver chew. Alicia guides students through the Field Naturalist Practicum as they solve these forest mysteries and cultivate an intimate understanding of the natural world. She is Executive Director of the Vermont Master Naturalist Program and an alum of the FN Program.

Joshua Brown

Writing Instructor, Field Naturalist Program

Josh is a science writer, environmental journalist, and photographer whose work has appeared in a variety of places, from the Wall Street Journal to Conservation Magazine to the NASA homepage. He teaches Professional Writing, helping FN students tackle a wide range of styles. Since 2006, he has been a staff writer at UVM covering all the natural and physical sciences. His reporting work has taken him from bat caves in Vermont to the ice sheet of Greenland.

Rachel Goland

Cohort AN, Class of 2025

Rachel grew up in upstate New York and has since had the privilege of exploring mountains and other wild places near and far from home. Rachel graduated from Cornell University with a B.S. in Environmental and Sustainability Sciences. As an undergrad she counted seedlings in New Hampshire’s forests, led teenagers in felling trees and building bridges on the trails of New England, and spent many hours working in Cornell’s herbarium, collecting, preparing, and digitizing specimens. Since graduation, Rachel has assisted in research efforts in the White Mountains of New Hampshire focused on water quality and plant phenology and been a land manager for conservation easements in the Adirondacks. She has also collaborated with the National Phenology Network and is highly interested in citizen science and optimizing land management practices for increased resiliency in the face of climate change. Outside of work and school, Rachel enjoys exploring the outdoors by foot, ski, or boat and foraging for fungi.

Lucy Gross

Cohort AN, Class of 2025

Growing up in the Midwest, Lucy often found the places she traveled, like the Boundary Waters and Rockies, far more exciting. However, when she wandered into a prairie with a botanist while attending Grinnell College, the vast plant diversity made it just as fascinating as those far-off places. Understanding plants opened the door to her deep appreciation of ecosystems and began her interest in ecological restoration and land management. She continued her path in restoration while in both Minnesota and Massachusetts, branching out to wetlands, forests, and riparian habitats. Her interest in the intersection of ecological health and agriculture culminated in farming for a year at an organic community farm, where she saw firsthand that people are seeking a connection to land. Whether as a restoration practitioner, farmer, or environmental educator, she is always searching to learn something new. Lucy's favorite time of year is spring ephemeral season, and when she is not out hiking or in search of the next swimming hole, she is often joyfully cooking a labor-intensive meal and listening to a book.

Robert Langellier

Cohort AN, Class of 2025

Robert is a magazine writer and field botanist from the Missouri Ozarks. After being fired from a hometown job waiting tables, he decided to become a long-haul trucker, a confused tangent that became a feature story for Esquire. Throughout his 20s, he oscillated between stints in freelance writing – publishing stories with National Geographic, The Nation, and New York Times Opinion – and conservation work, which has included field botany in the Northern Rockies and the Ozarks. Much of his natural resource work is informed by fire, either on a hotshot wildland firefighting crew in northern California or running prescribed fire crews in Missouri. A throughline of his work has been a deep love for Ozark flora and the written word. Two of his reporting projects have taken him to the war in Ukraine, one of which was nominated, weirdly, for Best American Sports Writing 2017. Entering the Field Naturalist Program, Robert has managed to delay the choice between a writing career and a botany career even further.

Veronica Magner

Cohort AN, Class of 2025

Before moving to Vermont, Veronica grew trees for the City of Philadelphia, aiding in the effort to grow and restore the native tree canopy in the city's watershed parklands. She is currently expanding on her ability to support urban environmental stewardship through the Field Naturalist Program. She has a background in architecture, which stems from a general desire to make sense of the physical world and informs her understanding of human impacts within it. Her environmental design work has been published in Powering Places, an outlet of the Land Art Generator Initiative. She is or has been a craftsperson, a draftsperson, a bartender, a boutique chicken accessory seamstress, a person who can't whistle, and a radio DJ.

Steve Root

Cohort AN, Class of 2025

Steve was born and raised in Florida, where he spent his youth exploring longleaf pine forests and coastal sand dunes before studying psychology at the University of Miami. After graduating, he served as a Peace Corps volunteer, connecting deeply to the land and people of Kyrgyzstan while living and working in the Tien Shan Mountains. He then moved to California and worked as an outdoor guide, trail access coordinator, and land steward. He left the comforts of the Redwood Forest and enrolled in the Field Naturalist Program to deepen his understanding of the natural world and to explore ways to promote a stronger connection to nature in all people. Steve enjoys running, green tea, bananas, and peanut butter.

Alyssa van Doorn

Cohort AN, Class of 2025

Growing up on the Jersey Shore, Alyssa spent many days soaking up the sun and wading through ocean water looking for marine critters. Her original interest lay in marine science, but as she grew and ventured into the woodlands of her home state she found herself drawn to the forests. Since graduating from Rowan University with a B.S. in Geographic Information Science and minors in Environmental Studies and Art, Alyssa has followed the call of the forest. She’s lived and worked in New England since finishing her undergraduate studies, first working with the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), where her affinity for field science and the natural world only expanded. She reveled in getting to tramp around the woods everyday, conducting plant diversity surveys and trapping small mammals, affectionately known as “smammals.” After her time with NEON, she put both her forest science and geospatial analysis skills to work as a GIS and Forest Science analyst with Wildlife Works, right here in Burlington. Alyssa is delighted to continue to call Vermont home where in her off time you may find her snowboarding at Smuggs, paddleboarding on Lake Champlain, or rollerblading down the bike path.

Greta Aiken

Cohort AO, Class of 2026

Ben Applegate

Cohort AO, Class of 2026

Ben has been drawn to trees ever since he started climbing them as a child growing up in southwestern Ohio. His fascination grew into a love of forests as he hiked throughout Maine and New Hampshire as a teenager. After studying forestry and ecology at the University of New Hampshire, he went on to work for an ecosystem management initiative in northeastern Vermont. He found both the wilderness he craved and a strong human community there in the Northeast Kingdom. It's where he met his wife Jessica and has since raised two wonderful children. Ben’s career path has wandered over the years from brief stints as a high school science teacher and carpenter to ongoing work as an arborist. For the past 15 years he has worked for Eden Specialty Ciders, a cider company dedicated to supporting Vermont apple growers, where he stewarded a two-acre organic orchard. Ben joined the FN Program to deepen his ecological awareness and help propel him into community-based conservation. He enjoys gardening, family time, canoe camping, backcountry skiing, and of course climbing trees.

Naya Banerjee

Cohort AO, Class of 2026

As an adolescent, Naya left suburban Maryland with her family to settle in New Delhi, India. In the midst of that immense city, she found herself in an oasis of wilderness as she rambled the thorny, dry, deciduous jungles of the Delhi ridge. Born to two Indian biologists, she was drawn to the academic life, working as a researcher and professor of mathematics for over a decade at the University of Delaware. She has also done stints as an apprentice arborist, a carpenter, a farmworker, and has trained and worked as a psychoanalyst. The Covid pandemic underlined the fleeting nature of existence and prompted her to integrate her joy of being a part of the natural world with her professional life. Through the FN program she hopes to hone her field skills and to work on the environmental issues that affect the communities in her chosen home. Besides relaxing in stillness, Naya enjoys caring for forest and garden, learning to wrench on machinery, perfecting her whole wheat sourdough, and roaming the mountains with her canine and human loved ones.

Laura Costello

Cohort AO, Class of 2026

Laura grew up in the woods and corn fields of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. She studied computer engineering in Boston and loved her career in software product management, but a chance encounter with a pink lady’s-slipper orchid threw her life for a loop. Before she knew it, she was a land steward and an avid orchid seeker, and she couldn’t stop talking about plants. Laura is a passionate believer in the potential of community science and the power of shared joy. She’s in the FN program to broaden her engagement with the natural world and her ability to convey its wonders. When not in the woods, you’ll find her social dancing, baking fancy treats, and hosting themed parties.

Emily DeAlto

Cohort AO, Class of 2026

Emily grew up in New Jersey and attended Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, where she received a B.S. in Earth and Environmental Sciences. Tearing up the coast in search of cooler weather, she became an AmeriCorps intern in Vermont's Department of Environmental Conservation, where she fell head over heels with this green state. At the DEC, she planted trees, removed invasives, created stormwater education programs, and organized community scientists and their data. She went on to work in environmental consulting in Denver, Colorado, where she found passion in the study of wetlands. Somewhere along the way she picked up a sense of wonder towards the world of fungi, an interest that has followed along her career from the side lines, peeking in whenever possible. Back in Vermont as an FN, she is excited to be reconnecting with her roots in the East and expanding them deeper and wider by learning how to read her landscape and tell its story. Emily loves to move outdoors: hiking, skiing, practicing yoga on her porch, and now botanizing! Anything to take in a few extra breaths of cold morning air at the start of each day.

Matthias Sirch

Cohort AO, Class of 2026

Matthias is fascinated by the philosophical questions of science and humanity's place in the natural world. After earning a degree in Wildlife and Fisheries Biology from the University of Vermont with a focus in geospatial technologies, Matthias worked on conservation projects across the United States — from studying wildfire recovery in the mixed-grass prairies of southwestern Kansas, to surveying the urban forest fragments of northern Delaware, to tracking songbirds through the dense uluhe ferns of O'ahu, Hawai'i. Upon returning home to Vermont, Matthias expanded his data-wrangling expertise with the UVM Spatial Analysis Lab and the Forest Ecosystem Monitoring Cooperative, building on his skills and passion for making complex information more accessible. He has come to appreciate work that makes data meaningful, finding the heart, nurturing a culture of conservation, and deepening our connection with nature. Outside of fieldwork and data analysis, Matthias enjoys walking slowly, growing potatoes, and plucking guitars.