Name: Sophia Beckmann
Class Year: 2026
Major: Biology
Hometown: Somerville, MA
Internship Organization: Smithsonian Environmental Research Center
Internship Title: Molecular Biology Intern
Location: Edgewater, MD
What's happening at your internship? We would love to hear what kind of work you are doing!
My project explored how projected climate change conditions have impacted methane emissions of the invasive model species, Phragmites Australis. This is a part of a greater project called C-EVO, which explores how Phragmites responds to elevated CO2, and enriched Nitrogen, paying special attention to how these factors effect rapid evolution and natural selection of the genotypes. To measure methane emissions, I installed PVC collars into the ground in the 12 chambers of the experiment. Then I would use a portable gas analyzer equipped with a PVC chamber to measure the gases by placing the chamber on top of the PVC. Fluxes were measured weekly, and the order in which the fluxes were conducted rotated each time. Then an R programming packaged called “Flux Finder” was used to analyze the data and figure out the mols of metha