Ben Applegate

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

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

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

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

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.

Greta Aiken

Bio coming soon...

Cohort AN (Class of 2025)

Rachel Goland

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

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

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

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

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

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.