Our featured student is Bonnie Reese, a doctoral candidate in the Natural Resources program within the Rubenstein School of Environment & Natural Resources, and the winner of the 2018 Thomas J. Votta Scholarship.
IMPACT: Bonnie, congratulations on the the Votta Scholarship! Please tell our readers a little bit about where you are from and how you got interested in Natural Resources?
BONNIE: I grew up in the small, historic town of Concord, Massachusetts. I played tennis competitively and read extensively, gravitating towards books with rich character development and eventually towards nonfiction literature in Psychology. In my undergraduate career I majored in Psychology because I was curious about what motivated people and how others' world views might be different from mine. I also took many classes in Religions of Asia and Philosophy as I grew to understand the significance of culture in human behavior. I spent my Junior year of college abroad and returned to write a Senior thesis on cultural psychopathology and culture-bound syndromes. My instinctive curiosity about human behavior and cultural differences, combined with a desire to help others, steered me towards the discipline of Psychology.
IMPACT: What inspired you to go to graduate school at UVM?
BONNIE: I was inspired to go to UVM after a Gund Tea event where Jennie Stephens delivered a talk on the social dimensions of the energy system transition. She spoke to the critical need to change levels of energy consumption in order to transition to a clean energy future. At the time I had just left a job as the Chief Strategy Officer of a virtual reality startup and spent a few weeks visiting my parents on the small island of Vinalhaven, Maine. While on Vinalhaven I engaged in one of my favorite activities: attending a field walk led by a local naturalist. While on this walk I was struck by how happy I was learning about the natural world and how deeply I wanted to preserve and protect the natural beauty around me.
When I visited the Gund for Jennie Stephen’s lecture, I was blown away by the opportunity that she described. I learned that 98% of emissions in the United States can be attributed to energy consumption and that behavioral change was a critical step in reducing emissions. The work she described as so critically important required a thoughtful analysis of human behavior, an interest I had nurtured since childhood. Further, the distribution of new ideas for behavioral change could be achieved through entrepreneurship, a field I had both studied in an MBA program at Babson and experienced first hand when I co-founded an RFID-based technology start-up where I served as CEO for three years. I had been using that knowledge base to advise entrepreneurs on their business development strategy but, after hearing Jennie speak, I recognized an opportunity to apply these skills to protecting the environment. Jennie Stephen’s talk illuminated a way for my interests in psychology, entrepreneurship, and the environment to complement one another and allow me to make a difference.
IMPACT: Tell us about your experiences in grad school, and what it is like to work with faculty members and to do your own scholarship...
BONNIE: Graduate school has been a wonderful experience for me. The UVM community has been deeply supportive of the work I am passionate about accomplishing, providing an exceptional learning environment and celebrating my hard work. Earlier this year I received the Thomas J. Votta Fund for the Environment Award. This award was established by the friends and family of Thomas J. Votta, a UVM alumnus who was passionate about the environment and dedicated his career to environmental best practices. Now the award is given annually to a graduate student who wishes to make a difference in solving environmental problems. It was a great honor to receive this award and to feel recognized for my commitment to solving environmental problems.
My background in entrepreneurship has been highly valued as well, and it has been an honor and a privilege to work with a diverse group of faculty, staff, and students on the Entrepreneurship Forum over the past three years. This group brings together entrepreneurially minded individuals from both on and off campus in order to find ways to support the entrepreneurial ecosystem both on UVM's campus and in the wider community. Through this work I have been able to meet and develop relationships with a wonderful group of passionate, intelligent community leaders and students who are dedicated to bringing their ideas to life and to supporting the dreams of local entrepreneurs.
The caliber of educational content, both in and out of class, has been remarkable as well. Seemingly every week there is another speaker I don't want to miss. Earlier this month I ran into the Chair of my dissertation committee on his way to see a lecture by Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us. I ended up joining him and his wife for the lecture and learned a great deal about population growth and the importance of female education. This type of serendipitous learning is a key reason why I have enjoyed my experience at UVM so much.
I've also enjoyed teaming up with a core group of faculty and doctoral students in UVM's IGERT program to study the Smart Grid and energy system transition. It has been a pleasure getting to know so many intelligent, articulate people and to engage in transdisciplinary brainstorming sessions and thought experiments. It has also been a real pleasure to engage in scientific research, leveraging research frameworks and methodologies to explore critical ideas in a way that will fill a gap in the literature on entrepreneurship in the energy system transition.
IMPACT: You have had a very interesting experience thus far! Are there any faculty members in the Graduate College or your program that have been particularly important to you?
BONNIE: I feel honored to have been able to work with so many distinguished professors and have expanded my skill set far beyond what I initially expected. In my first year of school I took a class on Energy System Transitions with Jennie Stephens that was filled with lively debates, controversial ideas, and an undercurrent of hope for positive, transformative change. I also took classes on the Smart Grid with Paul Hines and on Ecological Economics with Joshua Farley, which fundamentally transformed how I understood the market and the complex system of our energy infrastructure.
These classes not only convinced me that studying the energy system was critical and urgent, but they also opened my eyes to the degree of complexity in an energy system transition. I joined the IGERT Smart Grid program in the second year of my PhD program in order to learn how to approach and analyze complex systems. Through the process of earning my Certificate in Complex Systems, I explored evolutionary algorithms and learned to model chaotic systems with tools like differential equations, random boolean networks, and cellular automata. This required the acquisition of many new skills in mathematics and computer science, and I was fortunate enough to work closely with the Chair of the Computer Science department, Maggie Eppstein, to accomplish this. I count myself extremely lucky to have had the opportunity to work with so many talented, brilliant, and inspirational faculty at UVM.
IMPACT: Tell our readers where you are in your graduate education and what you plan to do after graduating.
BONNIE: I am currently in the third year of my PhD program and have recently completed my comprehensive exams. I am now working on developing my proposal and coordinating a summer internship in Montpelier. This year I co-taught a class on Energy System Transitions with two other IGERT students, Sonya Ahamed and Austin Thomas, which reaffirmed my passion for teaching. Post-graduation I am looking forward to exploring teaching opportunities in Vermont while also keeping one foot in the entrepreneurial world. Throughout my PhD program I have remained involved with Vermont’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and served on the board of several companies and accelerator programs. After graduation, I hope to continue working with entrepreneurs to develop their business models and find success. In an ideal scenario, my career post-graduation would involve working with entrepreneurs, conducting research on institutional entrepreneurship and the energy system transition, and teaching students.
IMPACT: UVM has definitely ramped up its involvement in the local "entrepreneurial ecosystem" and it’s great that you have been and will stay involved in that. Any interests outside of school?
BONNIE: I am fundamentally a curious person, which is perhaps why I am still in school and continuing to experience such a deep enjoyment of the learning process. This curiosity has resulted in a plethora of extracurricular activities including tennis, running, sailing, improvisational acting, clamming, gardening, and hiking. I love being outside and spending time with my five-year-old daughter, Scarlet, who shares my inquisitive nature and high level of energy. One of my favorite pastimes continues to be attending field walks and learning more about Vermont's ecosystem.