Bethany Johnson

Bethany A Johnson

The Professor William Stratford Prize 2020-2021: Biography

Bethany Johnson is a City College summer 2020 graduate, majoring in Biology. This will be her second bachelor’s degree; her first was in filmmaking from Fitchburg State University in her home state of Massachusetts. She is passionate about wildlife conservation and habitat preservation and aspires to work in conservation management and planning for a government agency or international organization, where she can utilize her background in communication to help educate the public on climate change.

She researches in Dr. Robert P. Anderson’s lab at City College, studying the effects of deforestation on geographic range predictions for a threatened rodent endemic to the cloud forests of Mexico. She joined the Anderson Lab as part of the NSF-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program in 2019 and continued on to complete her undergraduate thesis. She has presented her research at several scientific conferences, including the 2020 annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America and the 2020 Student Conference on Conservation Science. She is also on a project team working to expand the ecological niche modeling software Wallace, where she assists in debugging software and producing training material for new users. She is currently working toward publishing her thesis and applying to graduate schools.