Melanie Cham

Melanie Cham graduated from Wesleyan University in 2024 with majors in earth and environmental science and archaeology.  During her time at Wesleyan, she studied bacterial speciation and diversity with Dr. Frederick Cohan.  This led to a summer research project funded by Wesleyan’s College of Integrative Sciences studying the effects of microplastics on the bacterial strains found in agricultural soils.  The results of this research were presented at the 2021 Wesleyan Research in Science symposium and has been published by the American Chemical Society.

Melanie’s academic interest lies in learning more about the past. In 2021, she began research with Dr. Dana Royer in earth and environmental sciences at Wesleyan.  During this study, she measured the stomatal index of red maples by simulating environmental conditions from the Eocene to the Miocene to observe how plant anatomy varies with changes in the atmosphere.  In 2022, with support from the McNair Scholars Program, she began an independent project, titled “A Novel Method for Estimating Carbon Assimilation Rates from Fossil Leaves”, with Dr. Caroline Strömberg at the University of Washington.  For this research, instead of using living organisms to interpret the past, she began using fossils to infer ecological responses to contemporary global warming.  Melanie has presented her work at four national conferences: 2022 UCLA National McNair Conference; 2022 Geological Society of America Conference; 2023 Botanical Society of America Conference; and 2024 Mid-Continental Palaeobotanical Colloquium.  She is set to begin her PhD in biology at the University of Washington in Fall 2025.

In her Fulbright-Nehru program, Melanie is conducting paleontological research with Dr. Bandana Samant at the Central University of Punjab.  The goal of the project is to estimate regional atmospheric carbon dioxide levels before the mass extinction event of the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary (K–Pg) which occurred 66 million years ago.  For this, she is using information from microscopic leaf fossils collected from the Deccan Volcanic Province (DVP) of India.  This novel use of gas-exchange modeling with fossils from the DVP have the potential to strengthen the current assumptions of CO₂ which are based on different proxies.