Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

Shatiyana Dunn, MPS joined SERC as a Participatory Science Program Assistant in August 2023 to revamp the Classroom Cultivation: Exploring Plant Ecology program. Classroom Cultivation is a native plan conservation program that employees the help of middle and high schools to grow plants under different conditions as a part of SERC's decades long plant ecology research.

Prior to becoming staff at SERC, Shatiyana interned at SERC in August 2022 to work on cultural adaptations for the Reed educational program. She aimed to explore how to make educational information apply to people of different races, age, gender identifies, religions. In March 2023 she started her second SERC internship, this time working on the Faith and Science project focused in Baltimore, MD working hand and hand with marginalized communities to foster functioning environmental spaces to battle environmental factors such as invasive species and heat island while also learning about biodiversity of plants, animals, and insects. She obtained a Master's of Professional Science in Tropical Marine Ecology from the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science. She attended Louisiana State University where she earned a B.S. in Biological Sciences with a concentration in Marine Biology. During her time as an undergraduate student she worked as a student researcher under Dr. Prosanta Chakrabarty and acted as one of the founding members of the SCI Lead council.