Today at Brown

It’s a beautiful thing: The international company L’Oreal, known for glamorizing women with its makeup, skin, and hair products, is funding a Brown postdoctoral researcher’s ecology project.

Erika Sudderth, a postdoctoral research associate in ecology and evolutionary biology, had applied to numerous organizations seeking money to study the effects that climate change may have on grasslands in the American Southwest. She was looking at a new home in Providence with her husband, Erik, who had been hired to join the computer science faculty, when her phone rang. It was a L’Oreal representative telling her she had won $60,000 as a U.S. fellow in the company’s “Women in Science” program. She is one of five scientists to be named a fellow for 2009, and the first from Brown.

“I was mostly just surprised,” Sudderth said, recalling her reaction. “There are lots of these fellowships. You put in an application, and you never hear from them again. You don’t expect to be chosen.”

But Sudderth, who works with Professor of Biology Osvaldo Sala, had a winning idea. Grasslands cover 40 percent of the earth’s land surface and are a predominant feature in the arid American Southwest. Besides their ecological value, all of the major food grains – corn, wheat, oats, and rice – originate in grasslands.

The effect of climate change on America’s grasslands is yet unknown. A host of studies based on climate modeling project that the Southwest and other areas of the West will become drier over the coming decades and will experience violent weather-related spasms, such as heavy rains or droughts. Sudderth’s goal is to see how grassland plants “may respond to these periods of extreme weather, and how resilient they are.”

Farms like this one in Texas rely on the vitality of America’s grasslands. To do that, she will track the response of plants at four established test sites in Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, and Texas. She plans to travel this summer to carry out her experiments, which also include examining the effects of rainfall on microbes, which are critical to cycling nitrogen and carbon in the soil.

According to L’Oreal, Sudderth met the company’s criteria that candidates have “exceptional academic records and intellectual merit, clearly articulated research proposals with the potential for scientific advancement, and outstanding letters of recommendation from advisers.”

The 32-year-old Sudderth said the funding is critical because it allows her to buy supplies to carry out her experiments and to travel to the sites. More broadly, it can help her meet her own goal of being hired as a faculty member or to a research academic position. The awards “help establish quality, a body of work,” she said.

Formerly a postdoctoral research scholar at UC-Berkeley, Sudderth earned her BA from UC-San Diego and her PhD from Harvard.