Cornell senior Bach earns coveted McElroy Fellowship

MOUNT VERNON — Elizabeth Bach, a senior biology and environmental studies major at Cornell College, has been awarded the R.J. McElroy Fellowship.

The award provides $10,000 per year of graduate study for up to three years.

Bach, of Richmond, Ind., will pursue graduate studies in soil ecology in tallgrass prairies through the plant biology department at Southern Illinois University. She intends a career researching below-ground ecology on prairies in an effort to preserve and restore this ecosystem.

Last summer she participated in a Research Experience for Undergraduates funded by the National Science Foundation at Kansas State University, where she studied the effects of dominant grass removal on the below-ground microbial community at Konza Prairie Biological Research Station. In summer 2005 she had a fellowship to study fertilizer phosphorous deposition in a tallgrass prairie remnant owned by Cornell alumna Rebecca Wearin Pulk ’62.

Bach is also president of the Cornell student organization EcoCorps and treasurer of Tri-Beta, the biology honor society. She plays flute and organ, is a member of Cornell’s Wind Ensemble, serves on the Cornell chaplain’s spiritual leadership team and actively participates in Geology Club.

“The McElroy Fellowship is a highly competitive award,” Cornell Dean Brenda Tooley said. “Cornell is fortunate to have students of the caliber of Elizabeth Bach, whose academic career has been simply brilliant and whose application for the award captured well her rigorous, passionate and creative engagement with the ecology of the high plains prairies.”

Two fellows were chosen by the trustees of the R.J. McElroy Trust. McElroy founded Waterloo television station KWWL. The fellowship recipients were selected from a field of eight finalists from colleges and universities in northeast Iowa; the other recipient attends Wartburg College.