Hunter Student Spotlight

 

An Interview with Hristiana Stoynova
By Christina Santiago, Hunter College, English major

 

Hristiana Stoynova, a senior in the Department of Geography and Environmental Science. She is currently working with Dr. Andrew Reinmann to quantify landscape patterns in carbon uptake and storage across heterogeneous suburban landscapes for her honors thesis.


What is her current research?
Despite being highly perturbed by human activities, carbon dynamics in urban/suburban landscapes are understudied and poorly understood and Hristiana's work will help to fill important gaps in the knowledge of this field. For her thesis, Hristiana is developing ahigh-resolution land cover map and using empirical measurements of carbon storage and fluxes in forest, grassland, lawn, and street tree ecosystems collected from a field siteon the campus of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Maryland.


What upcoming projects/research she will be conducting?
She presented some preliminary findings at the recent Society of Conservation GIS conference at Hunter College in April, 2019. Hristiana got accepted into a competitive summer research program at NIST to continue this research. NIST is one of the nation's premiere research institutions for the physical and engineering sciences and, as the lead Federal agency for technology transfer, it provides a strong interface between government, industry and academia. The NIST Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Program sponsors a 11-week summer internship program for undergraduate students enrolled at U.S. 2-year and 4-year institutions majoring in chemistry, computer science, engineering, materials science, fire research, nanotechnology, information technology, mathematics, biology, manufacturing, statistics, or other STEM discipline. Each fellow will spend the summer working closely with one or more research scientists at NIST and all fellows visit Capitol Hill to discuss STEM-related initiatives with representatives. Hristiana Stoynova will be working with David Allen of the Physical Measurements Laboratory on the NIST Forest Optical Reference for Evaluating Sensor Technology (FOREST) research project quantifying carbon dynamics in urban forests. The FOREST study is part of a multi-institutional collaborative project that includes CUNY (Andrew Reinmann), Boston University, and Bowdoin College.

Published: May 1, 2019