CHAMPAIGN, Ill. —University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign junior R. Fisher Houston is one of 65 students nationwide awarded the Udall Undergraduate Scholarship. This highly competitive scholarship program identifies future leaders in environmental, Tribal public policy and healthcare fields.
The Udall Undergraduate Scholarship honors the legacies of Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall, whose careers had a significant impact on Native American self-governance, healthcare and the stewardship of public lands and natural resources.
Houston, who graduated from Deerfield High School, is majoring in integrative biology honors, a degree program that provides 24 life sciences students the ability to pursue specialized coursework and research opportunities. He plans to pursue a doctorate in plant biology, researching mechanisms of stress tolerance in plants that survive in extreme conditions.
At Illinois, Houston studies the survival strategies of drought-resistant grasses in plant biology professor Rose Marks’ lab. His recent work has focused on leaf morphology, particularly on how stomata mediate gas exchange and water loss. He is continuing to develop machine-learning pipelines to scale his analysis. With the support of an Undergraduate Research Support Grant, he will continue exploring desiccation-tolerance with a systems biology approach, pairing morphological data with new investigations into whole-plant physiology, metabolomics and genetic regulation.
Besides his research activity, Houston serves as president of the Illinois Beekeeping Club and managed honeybees at the Student Sustainable Farm, taking them on field trips to local schools and campus events to demystify pollinators and educate others about conservation. Houston also focuses on campus sustainability, building bridges between his human and natural communities with grant-funded prairie restoration across campus. He plans to accelerate growth of similar green spaces through the formation of a pollinator network, connecting excited gardeners, beekeepers and students to cultivation resources.
A Chancellor’s Scholar in the Campus Honors Program, he has revitalized the CHP’s efforts to become more conservation-minded through the formation of a new student-run sustainability council. With Houston’s insight, the program is looking at installing a heat pump, water bottle refilling stations and a pollinator garden. The CHP is also supporting Houston’s summer exchange to Yanai, Japan, where he hopes to learn from landscaping techniques employed in Japanese gardens that have persisted for thousands of years using only natural materials. This intercultural dialogue is foundational in his mission to go beyond research and innovation to tackle the interdisciplinary problems threatening our planet.
“I think research, technology and policy can only protect our planet when paired with a cultural appreciation for the land and life around us. I want to share my love for nature as both a place of solace and community with the world in tandem with my conservation efforts,” Houston said. “As a Udall Scholar, I’m excited to meet environmental leaders striving to make their own connections between people and the planet.”
The Udall Foundation is committed to its core values of integrity, civility, consensus, public service and nonpartisanship. Accordingly, scholarship, internship and fellowship award determinations are free from discrimination based on political opinion, race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, reprisal or genetic information, as defined by law or regulation and governed by applicable case law.
Editor’s note:
For more information about Udall Scholarships, contact David Schug, the director of the National and International Scholarships Program, at topscholars@illinois.edu.