An Introduction

Hi! I'm Lillie Pennington. I'm a graduate student at UC Merced in the Sexton lab. As of writing this in August 2021, I am in my fifth year. I think I'm a pretty good student. I've had a few successful experiments, and I got honorable mention in the NSF GRFP and Ford pre-doctoral fellowship competitions. I've been told that honorable mention is as good as funded, except without the funding. In my fifth year, though, I'm looking towards the next steps. But I am also looking back on how I got here.

I'm basically from Oklahoma. My dad was in the army. I was born in Texas, we lived in New York for a while, then the army moved us to Oklahoma and we ended up staying there. I went to college at Oklahoma City University and I had a great time. I of course thought I was going to be a medical doctor, as many kids do when they enter college, but I took a botany class and decided I'd rather look at plants all the time. I worked for my academic advisor as a research assistant in her primate lab, studying orangutans. With her guidance, I participated in two research experience for undergraduates, one at Boston University in the Templer lab and one at UC Merced, in the Sexton lab.

Fieldwork at my Yosemite REU. That's me with the quadrat. I carried that thing through scorched forests to measure seedlings.

My cohort at the UC Merced REU. We had just climbed Mt Dana in Yosemite together!

My cohort at the Boston University REU

Members of the OCU Primate Lab! This is us after landing in Calgary, CA to present at the Anthropology Associate conference.

I graduated cum honore in 2015 and went to work for the Chicago Botanic Garden's Conservation Land Management program. My first appointment was in Susanville, California at the Eagle Lake BLM Field Office. Three other interns and I worked to collect native seed for the nation's Seeds of Success program. It was really hot pretty much everywhere on the field office, but I really loved working outside and getting to know the land that way. On the team, I was the intern who could accurately predict where the plants we were looking for would be. I got to know the gestalt of a lot of different plants in a short amount of time. It was great.

Crouched, sweating, and posing in the high desert of the ELFO

We seeds of success interns, frolicking

After that appointment was up I went home and before starting my second internship, I went to Iceland with my friends! It was such a fun trip, and was my first time flying across an ocean.

The crew at one of many icelandic waterfalls

My second appointment was at the Grants Pass BLM field office. I really enjoyed this position. Another intern and I were rare plant surveyors. We hiked across the land, often crashing through underbrush and scrambling up steep slopes to find rare and endangered plants. We were mostly looking for a rare lily, Fritellaria genteri, and a rare Cypripedium. Grants Pass was definitely not as hot and dry as the Eagle Lake field office. We were always fording streams and getting caught in rainstorms. It was so much fun! Hiking all day long across beautiful landscapes was a wonderful experience. And it felt so great when we finally found the plants we were looking for.

Me looking for endangered lilies in all the wrong places on the Grants Pass field office

We rare plant interns, caught in the rain once again

After Grants Pass I worked as a tutor for Upward Bound/Open Doors back home in OK. Over winter break, I went to visit a friend in Vietnam! She was my best friend in college and it was so cool to go and visit her in her own country and experience her culture. It was awesome!

I don't have a lot of great pictures from my time in VN, but here are me and my friend in Ninh Binh. My friend informed me that this is where the filmed a King Kong movie

I started graduate school in the Fall of 2017, two years after graduating college. I think those two years were crucial to my development, both as a scientist but also as a citizen of the world. Right now I'm a part of the Sexton lab at UC Merced. We study plants! It's great fun, and I love this lab a lot.

Sexton lab minus two members, on a lab backpacking trip to a monkeyflower population!

Now as I look to the next steps of my career, I find myself weighed down by the specter of climate change. I am determined to work in conservation and policy, ideally for a federal or state land managing agency.