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McCullough Fellows: Then and Now

UNC Asheville Sustainability Students’ Journeys After Graduation

By UNC Asheville

February 1^st, 2022

It’s been six years since the McCullough Institute at UNC Asheville was established in 2015, and with it the prestigious McCullough Fellowship. Through this competitive program, undergraduates complete an applied research project in collaboration with a faculty advisor and local partner organization. These projects address land use and conservation; urban planning; sustainable agriculture; or resilience and environmental sustainability—or even a combination of these areas.

So what happens next? We’ve caught up with several former McCullough Fellows to see where their lives and careers have taken them after graduating from UNC Asheville, and to learn how the McCullough Fellowship impacted that journey.

Louise Barton

Louise Barton was in the first McCullough Fellow cohort in 2015, with research focusing on native plant density on campus, how different non-native removal regimes impacted the density of those plants. Did pulling up non-native plants by hand impact the native plants? What about using chemicals?

That research experience was a springboard that took her around the world and back again after graduating from UNC Asheville.

“Honestly, UNCA and the research I did there set me up entirely for my career,” Barton said. “I went on and did a masters at CU Boulder in ecology evolutionary biology, and I studied in South Africa, looking at pollination.”

Barton spent four months in South Africa studying flowers and long-tongued flies that are perfectly co-evolved for one another for her thesis. From there she went to UC Berkeley to work towards a Ph.D., where she studied climate change biology.

And then her life took a new turn.

“In Berkeley I decided that this was a little bit too much school for me, and that I wanted to do something different, that was more applied but still involved conservation and still involved working then that same network of people,” Barton said. So she moved to Durango, Colorado, to work for the U.S. Forest Service. During her survey trips into the mountains, which could involve 12 mile hikes with 3,000 feet of elevation gain, and back-to-back multiday hikes in Yellowstone, she began hearing conversations about the food and packaging waste involved in trips like these—not to mention the bad taste of the food itself.

From there, Barton’s journey took a turn again; she left the Forest Service and with her wife started a new company, Farm to Summit, which uses sustainable packaging and upcycled produce—food that would have gone to waste on farms—to make dehydrated meals for backpacking trips.

While starting a new business may seem like a leap from biology research, Barton has found her experiences in research have been enormously helpful.

“It is the same exact process as science, is what I’m finding,” Barton said. “There's new terminology, and we’ve got to find financing and do that sort of stuff, but right now I'm writing grants which is something I've been doing my entire life. I have the tools to study our analytics which is really great. And there’s a lot of hypothesis testing… It seems shockingly parallel.”

While Barton says she misses “geeking out” with other scientists and researchers, she plans on continuing to pursue her passion for science through volunteer opportunities with local nonprofits. And she enjoys seeing the direct impact her current work is having on her community.

“Research is slow…you collect data for a decade sometimes before you actually get to present it, and get to hopefully make a difference within the knowledge base of your field,” Barton said. “With this business, there’s been community feedback and people constantly saying, ‘you're doing such a great thing for the community.’ People are really appreciative, from the farmers thanking us or just people that are purchasing the product saying ‘we're glad that we have this option.’ It feels really good.”

Zane Carroll

Zane Carroll, a member of the 2019 McCullough Fellows cohort, partnered with the Blue Horizons Project to conduct work focused on energy efficiency. Her project included promoting energy efficiency in the community and educating people on rebates and different opportunities to reduce energy consumption in the home. Carroll graduated in 2020—which was “a really interesting time to graduate” she said—and after working from home for a medical device company for a few months, landed another prestigious fellowship. She’s now a fellow with UNC-Chapel Hill’s Lead for North Carolina, a program in local government for recent college graduates.

“There's 24 of us across North Carolina, working for different local municipalities,” Carroll said. “Lead for North Carolina was created to address brain drain and small communities. A lot of people are leaving their small, rural towns and moving to cities, especially if they go to college and then they don't go back.”

“I'm predominantly doing project management, grant writing, and event planning for the town,” Carroll said. “There's only five of us that run the whole town in the office, and then we have a public works department. So, it's been really cool because I share an office with the town administrator. He asks for input on a lot of stuff, and brings me to a lot of meetings with developers that are really shaping the future of the community. It's pretty exciting and little intimidating sometimes.”

Carroll’s projects have included planning the town’s Christmas on the Square celebration, developing a public arts committee, and starting an incubator kitchen, a shared-use kitchen where food entrepreneurs can rent a commercial kitchen by the hour as a low cost way to start their business. Between the McCullough Fellowship and the Lead for NC fellowship, Carroll said she’s had the opportunity to see multiple sides of working with non-profits and local governments as the two entities work together to accomplish common goals.

When the fellowship concludes, Carroll plans to pursue grad school to study environmental policy. “My ideal path is grad school, nonprofit or governmental work…and then working back into academia. I have real passion for environmental policy, so it'd be really cool to pass that on to people.”

Kay Tyrlik

Kay Tyrlik was a member of the 2018 McCullough Fellows cohort, and graduated from UNC Asheville in 2019. During her fellowship Tyrlik built, placed and monitored nest boxes for hellbenders—a large but elusive aquatic salamander native to Appalachian rivers. Even after her McCullough Fellowship ended, Tyrlik continued working on her project and monitoring the nest boxes she had placed in Bent Creek, about 15 minutes from campus, in partnership with Wild South.

Tyrlik’s scientific pursuits after graduation led her to Poland with a Fulbright Scholarship, where she worked at the Institute of Immunology and Experimental Therapy.

“My project was on bacteriophages,” Tyrlik explained. “The whole lab, one of their main goals is to see if they can use bacteriophages for antibiotic resistant treatments… It was interesting because I was the only native English speaker. So, I had a lot of additional responsibilities; for example, helping them write publications and talking to the reviewers.”

Following her Fulbright Scholarship Tyrlik worked in a COVID testing lab for nine months, and then returned to school for a masters in epidemiology at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she’s studying tick-borne illnesses in North Carolina.

“Lyme disease is really underreported, and because of climate change and other ecological factors is on the rise,” Tyrlik said. “I really enjoy the project. I get to work with veterinarians in North Carolina, there's outreach to different universities.”

Tyrlik said her experiences in the McCullough Fellowship and her studies and work since then have taught her the skills necessary to be a successful researcher.

“With McCullough and the salamander project, doing that for as long as I did, I learned how it works to be in a research setting, and an academic research setting,” Tyrlik said. “Because there's a lot of little things that they don't talk about too much in classes, like writing grants, and waiting for paperwork and waiting for permits, which are things I still do now… It teaches you to be more organized, and to keep yourself accountable.”

Tyrlik hopes to work at a state health department after she completes her master’s degree, and says she grateful for the launching pad UNC Asheville provided her.

“I am very thankful that I did go to school at UNCA. I think I had a more personalized experience, especially because all my departments were very small,” Tyrlik said. “I think a lot of people dismiss you UNCA because it's so small, but you have more opportunities in some ways. People should just try to take advantage of it as much as they can.”

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