Undergraduate Research Opportunities Propel UM Graduate Toward Ph.D.

By Abigail Lauten-Scrivner, UM News Service

MISSOULA – Admittedly, Ryan Fleetwood likes to stay busy.

Fleetwood graduated from the University of Montana last fall with bachelor’s degrees in environmental science and sustainability, concentrating in water resources and geography. He also minored in climate change studies and pursued his GIS certificate, in addition to being involved in various clubs, organizations and offices across campus.

“I find it personally hard to pass up a good opportunity,” he said.

That ambition means Fleetwood, to his delight, won’t be leaving campus any time soon. Spring semester is a bridge between his undergraduate and graduate careers at UM. In May, he’ll finish his certificate of public administration before beginning his master’s of science in systems ecology this fall with the intention of declaring a Ph.D.

“This is a place I really do value not only as an institution, but as a location,” Fleetwood said. “I'd like to live in Montana, or at least this region, when I graduate.”

Fleetwood describes his decision to attend UM as a “really big leap” that has since paid dividends, moving across the country from Hagerstown, Maryland. He’d visited Yellowstone National Park as a high school freshman during a family vacation and joked with his parents about attending college in Montana. A couple years later, the idea turned serious and his family returned to tour UM and Montana State University.

“I toured Bozeman on a Tuesday and I thought I was going to go to Bozeman,” he said. “I toured UM on a Thursday, and I had no doubt I wanted to come here.”

Bringing his interest in the outdoors with him, Fleetwood took advantage of everything that attending college in Montana has to offer. He connected with the UM community by becoming deeply involved in the Foresters' Ball and Forestry Club and serving as treasurer for both, in addition to founding and serving as treasurer of UM’s Trout Unlimited chapter.

He’s also worked in the President’s Office for much of his time at UM, doing project-based work, research, writing up reports, creating spreadsheets and more.

Maggie Hansing, UM Director of Operations and External Engagement, supervised Fleetwood’s work and said he became a true member of the office’s team even as a student.

“I’m constantly amazed at everything that he has juggled during his time at UM and juggled it so flawlessly,” Hansing said. “He's got all these different interests and he somehow manages to make time for everything.”

“He's a pretty exceptional person and student and we are thrilled that he is going to be continuing,” she added. “I would be ecstatic if he never left.”

During undergrad, Fleetwood leveraged his interests to explore a diverse array of research opportunities in Montana and beyond. After his first year, he participated in the Boone and Crockett Club’s Demmer Scholars Program, interning with the Office of Environmental Policy and Compliance, Department of the Interior, on sustainability, environmental cleanup and environmental justice projects in Washington, D.C.

His second year, Fleetwood joined the Montana Climate Office’s Montana Mesonet project, looking to estimate snow water equivalent. The following summer, he worked with the Department of Defense as an imagery analyst. He also had stints as a Baucus Climate Scholar, interned for the Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority and worked with the USGS Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center.

As a junior, Fleetwood joined the GRate (Greenland Rate) project with UM’s Department of Computer Science, doing AI machine learning modeling of the ice sheet. Fleetwood presented his work at the UM Conference on Undergraduate Research, and multiple works are expected to be published in the next year.

“By May, I may have two or three first-author publications as an undergrad,” Fleetwood said. “I mean, that’s so exciting. And I think it prepares me for graduate school.”

The undergraduate research experiences Fleetwood garnered will feed directly into the work he’s pursuing through graduate school, studying under the guidance of Dr. Zach Hoylman, UM Research assistant professor and assistant state climatologist. Hoylman supervised Fleetwood’s undergraduate thesis and will serve as his graduate advisor.

The project will build on Fleetwood’s undergraduate thesis to create a spatial snow water equivalent model, integrating data from the Montana Mesonet Stations. The model will estimate the distribution of snow across the northern Great Plains – a sizable region –  bridging a knowledge gap between knowing how much snow there is and how much water that equates to.

“It's huge, really important work,” Fleetwood said. “But we're also looking at maybe another little more ambitious project, and I think this is where it gets more into a Ph.D.”

That project would seek to build a scientific model that incorporates global sea surface temperature data going back to the 1980s. The result would hopefully provide scientists and policy makers better outlooks on temperature and precipitation for either the western United States or the entire country.

No comparable models currently exist at that scale, Fleetwood said. The goal is to create better outlooks than those by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Prediction Center – the closest climate outlook comparison that presently exists but is relatively vague, he added.

The resulting model would be of significant value for the agricultural industry, fire management, flooding mitigation or other natural disasters, among many other applications.

“I have high hopes for it,” Fleetwood said of the project. “I think the work I've done as an undergrad has prepared me well for it.”

While graduating with his Ph.D. is a number of years out, Fleetwood is eyeing a future as a research scientist, preferably as tenure-track faculty and perhaps one day as a college dean.

“If I could have an ideal scenario, I'd do it here,” he said. “I've been at UM for three and a half years, and maybe it's working in the President's Office, but I really do believe in the mission we have here, and I think we do a good job at it.

It's inclusive prosperity – having accessible higher education, catering to all students and not just certain classes.”

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Contact: Dave Kuntz, UM director of strategic communications, 406-243-5659, dave.kuntz@umontana.edu.