Souls of SOLS: highlighting graduate student stories

Note: This story is part of an ongoing series profiling graduate students in the School of Life Sciences. See February’s featured students here.  

The research that goes on in the School of Life Sciences spans a huge and fascinating variety of subjects. The graduate students who make up SOLS are no less diverse or interesting, arriving at their respective research from different places and with different passions. Here, we recognize a handful of these graduate students, their work, and what motivates them to pursue it. 

Jules Petty – Environmental Life Sciences Program 

You might think that climate scientists mostly think about what’s around and above us, in our atmosphere. But Jules Petty, a second year PhD student, studies climate by going underground and looking at our soil. 

“I choose to study soil because I think it’s a pretty strong way of interpreting how an ecosystem is functioning... Being able to identify the processes [occurring in the soil] and understand them... can give us a picture of what is happening more broadly.”  

Petty will be collaborating with Yiqi Luo’s Eco Lab at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, to help create accurate computer-generated models of how carbon cycles through an ecosystem.  

“Modeling is just how to simplify the snapshots of data that we get into one cohesive story. We can look at the old theories of what people thought [about] how carbon cycled in the past and improve upon those stories with new data.” 

Petty specifically looks at ways to model how carbon cycles through the soil in dryland ecosystems, or ecosystems characterized by a lack of water, like much of Arizona. Drylands make up a huge portion of the Earth’s surface –– about 40 percent –– but are very understudied as far as how carbon cycles through the ecosystem, according to Petty.  

As the species living in dryland ecosystems shift along with climate change, it’s important for scientists to understand how those changes will affect the way carbon cycles in drylands, Petty says: “We know humans can’t exist without the natural resources our world’s ecosystems provide. Now that we are seeing important ecosystems changing, it’s critical to understand where they are going and how they can still support our communities sustainably.” 

Petty hopes that their research will help land-use managers in drylands make decisions about how to protect their land in the future. 

Jarrett Joubert – Biology and Society Program, History and Philosophy of Science track 

The HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s changed the medical field and the social status of queer people forever. Jarrett Joubert, a third year PhD student, hopes to learn more about the decisions that scientists had to make when trying to treat the deadly epidemic –– decisions that have affected the lives of tens of thousands of people. 

“My research will be telling the story of how [HIV] drugs were developed, specifically why scientists chose to pursue one class of drugs over another.” 

Joubert has a personal stake in this subject: “I’m a queer Black man... [belonging to] a group that has some of the highest risk factors for HIV. I always think about HIV –– even if I don’t want to –– because it's a script that’s been put on my body. That’s why I’m so interested in researching this.” 

Joubert was recently accepted into Knowledge of AIDS, an NSF-funded research community development project creating a network amongst scholars who study HIV/AIDS. As part of the network, Joubert will have the chance to attend yearly workshops around the US with interdisciplinary HIV/AIDS researchers.  

“I’m excited because as a graduate student... you’re [working] by yourself so much. This [opportunity] will enable me to talk to a lot of other people who care about the same stuff, but study it in a different way.” 

As Joubert learns more about how scientists made decisions when developing HIV treatments, being part of the network will help him connect that history to its broader social impacts, which still affect people like him today.