Stacey Smith '99, just awarded a prestigious Marshall Scholarship, is building toward her career goal the way an artist paints a masterpiece--by adding layers and textures, light and depth, just where they are needed.

The Marshall Scholarship for study in England, often considered the equal of the coveted Rhodes Scholarship, was created by the British government in gratitude to the American people for the Marshall Plan after World War II. Smith is one of only 37 Americans this year to receive the scholarship. She is Virginia Tech's second Marshall Scholar, following Anya McGuirk (agricultural economics '80).

For Smith, a Virginia Tech senior majoring in biology and Spanish, the scholarship adds yet another major dimension to her preparation for a career researching ways to preserve endangered plants and habitats. Smith has been building toward those goals most of her life with passion, dedication, and impeccable scholarship.

Her love of nature started on her grandfather's farm, and his gift of a Peterson's Wildflower Guide, along with a challenge to record every species of flower there, started her passion for plants.

By the time she reached Virginia Tech, she was "unusually mature and focused," says Barbara Cowles of Tech's Honors Program. Smith started doing research during her second semester, building experience and learning valuable lessons from each task she set for herself.

Instead of spending her first summer relaxing or working to make money, Smith assisted with a research project at Virginia's Great Dismal Swamp, compiling species lists and pressing floral samples. "Many others had identified these flowers before," Smith says, "but each was a new and wonderful discovery for me.... Plant classification links human experience to the natural world through the thrill of discovering each new plant and by instilling respect for the incredible diversity of life."

During her sophomore year, a sequence of intertwined events began that landed her in Costa Rica. She had been studying and doing research into such subjects as plant molecular biology and genetic engineering. Honors Program staff encouraged Smith to apply for the Daughtrey Scholarship, set up by alumnus William Daughtrey '62 to provide a student with $10,000 for a self-designed educational experience.

Stacey Smith '99 started examining the way native people interact with their ecosystems while doing summer research in Costa Rica.

In preparing the application, Smith talked with a professor at the University of Georgia who was working on river shoreline reclamation in Costa Rica. He offered Smith a volunteer summer position, which she accepted. Every day she pedaled a bicycle from the lush rainforest of the La Selva Biological Station to conduct interviews with farmers in the nearby agricultural communities. In the process, she not only learned how their way of life affected land use and stream quality, but she started thinking about how the native people interacted with their ecosystem.

That experience helped shape her project when she won the Daughtrey Scholarship and returned to Costa Rica in the summer of 1997. She had seen, for example, the fragmentation of the tropical forest and realized that the communities she had come to love were also the ones who were, for reasons of survival, fragmenting the ecosystem she was attempting to preserve. She knew from her genetic-engineering courses that when habitats are fragmented and species isolated into small patches, they cannot "maintain the genetic diversity necessary to fight rapidly evolving diseases and insect attacks."

"Perhaps," she wrote in the Marshall application, "if plants in one patch maintained pollen flow with those in other patches, the genetic diversity would be preserved." She decided that "genetic technology can unravel this question and guide us to the preservation of species threatened by fragmentation." She also realized that scientists addressing the issue "must have the courage to approach it with not only data but a compassion for the inhabitants of the lands."

In designing her Daughtrey experience, she chose to live with a rural family so she could better appreciate how their language, culture, and religion affected their attitudes toward nature.

In the meantime, Smith has been distinguishing herself, even in the University Honors Program that deals with the school's top students. She is a member of numerous honor societies, including Phi Beta Kappa, and earned several scholarships, including the Morris Udall Scholarship, the Thomas Moss Leadership Scholarship, and the Phi Sigma (Biological Honor Society) Scholarship.

Unusual for an undergraduate, Smith wrote grant proposals and got funding from a special National Science Foundation initiative for undergraduate research. She presented posters depicting her work at two regional conferences, as well as the North American Benthological Society Meeting.

In her studies and research, she prepared well for everything she undertook, laying the foundations and building the expertise a piece at a time. For example, says Tech biology professor Arthur Buikema, Smith conducted research on gene flow and dispersal of aquatic insects. However, before undertaking the research investigating mitochondrial DNA, Smith spent two years working in a plant biotechnology laboratory learning techniques to isolate and analyze DNA.

Smith acts on her interest in people as well as the environment. She helped with a Habitat for Humanity house constructed by an all-women volunteer crew in Norfolk. As usual, she learned--this time, how to do construction work and how to work as part of a team.

The meticulous care and intense passion with which Stacey Smith approaches her life and work paid off with one of the most prestigious awards an undergraduate can receive, the Marshall Scholarship. Through it, Smith hopes to study conservation genetics at the United Kingdom's Centre for Plant Diversity and Systematics at the University of Reading's Department of Botany.

She will pursue a research degree in plant sciences, focusing on the impact of human disturbance on plant populations. As a professor at a research institution, she plans to focus her research on tropical plants of Latin America, "where human activities like urbanization, agriculture, and, in particular, cattle ranching have relegated the species-rich rainforest into discrete patches and threaten endemic plants and animals." Her objective, she says, "is to determine how human's activities affect gene flow between fragmented plant populations and use the knowledge to better resolve the struggle between conservation and development."

Smith has learned, Buikema says, that "any person can create change if she or he wants to do so. Ms. Smith believes that she can create change; I believe that she will."