St. Lawrence University

Over the summer, I was lucky enough to work with Professor Lisa Torrey building a machine learning model to identify growth of invasive water chestnut around St. Lawrence county using drone imagery. We worked alongside biology Professor Brad Baldwin, leader of the ongoing Water Chestnut Project (https://sites.stlawu.edu/brad-baldwin/water-chestnut-project/), which aims to study and fight the growth of this invasive species in the rivers and lakes surrounding SLU.

As the student manager of St. Lawrence's permaculture garden, I was responsible for daily maintenance of the garden (weeding, mulching, planting), managing weekly volunteers, creating interactive farmers' market displays, and planning, advertising, and running community events at the garden.

This summer, Martina conducted 30-40 weekly hours of research where she collected, quantified, and analyzed the amount of microplastics present in the Grasse River.

Any biological explanation of cognition must come to grips with the fact that she who offers the explanation lies among the living systems that are her objects of study, and because of this her explanation must include herself and an account of the processes by which she is able to give such explanations. Such is the basis for the biological phenomenology of Francisco Varela.