A Project of Her Own

Most UNC-Chapel Hill PhD students oversee their own research projects for their dissertations. But Kriddie Whitmore did it in a foreign country — and with the added challenges of a language barrier, bad weather and limited equipment. This past summer, Whitmore traveled to the Andes Mountains in Ecuador, tackling their demands with incredible tenacity and creativity.

On June 8, 2021, the second season of Diego Riveros-Iregui’s project started. Taking place in the Ecuadorian páramo, an exotic and remote landscape in the northern Andes Mountains, the project studies how carbon travels through water, air and land.

Whitmore has been working on the project since 2019, but this year she has been running it, which means managing all of the experiments and data collection.

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Diego Riveros-Iregui is the Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geography within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences.

This project is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Hydrologic Sciences Program.

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