Ben Fishman

Undergraduate Fellow

“My overarching priority is learning how I can best aid the conservation of biodiversity; it's the thing I'm most passionate about. I think a lot of it is my family. My dad is a very involved marine conservationist, and my brother works for a marine conservation nonprofit. I was also really inspired by a photographer named Joel Sartore. He started the National Geographic Photo Ark project, which is this really cool effort to photograph all of the species currently in captivity in the world—both to document species that are going extinct and to raise awareness for the ones that we can still save. That project inspired me so much that I thought, ‘I want to make a difference like that.’”

What made you want to join the Tick and Wildlife team specifically?

“When I saw what Solny's team does with the intersection of tick ecology and avian ecology, I was just so fascinated. A lot of it is my passion for birds; in my fifth grade yearbook I said that I wanted to grow up to be an ornithologist. If I were fighting to conserve one species, it would be a bird. And I think disease ecology is a really interesting way to go about that because it's immediately related to humans. When you're arguing for efforts to conserve biodiversity, the issue of human impact becomes really important.”

What has it been like to connect with your team remotely?

“Obviously, it's very difficult to forge any type of friendship or connection through a Zoom call, but I'm really grateful to Solny, Sacha, and Anahi for doing their best to make that happen. We’ve been chatting a lot about anti-racism and we actually devoted a Slack channel to sharing links and information to educate ourselves on that issue. We all are trying to think about this more and help each other reach a better level of understanding. It's a lot easier to do that when you have people that are making the same journey alongside you.

One thing that's interesting is that we've been talking about how the protests are affecting us differently. Some of my group is in St. Louis, some in Illinois, I’m in New York, so what we see around us is very different. Maybe that's one positive aspect of being online: we can actually talk about what's happening in different places.”

Ben worked with Solny Adalsteinsson's Tick & Wildlife Ecology team during summer 2020. Learn more about their prescribed fire and tick-borne disease ecology research here.