This past May, Earth Grant’s Program Assistant, Lexis, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and is moving on to the ‘real world’. During their freshman year, Lexis was in the inaugural Earth Grant cohort in 2021 and was then hired as the first Program Assistant where they supported the program for three years.

We asked Lexis some parting questions to celebrate their participation in Earth Grant during their college career.

There are small but subtle changes that take place in Southern Arizona's climate before our yearly monsoon rains start.

At the University of Arizona, monsoon season is also a time for friendly competition. Returning for a fifth year is Southwest Monsoon Fantasy Forecasts, a game inspired by fantasy football and March Madness that allows participants to estimate the amount of rainfall the monsoon will bring each month to a handful of cities throughout the Southwest.

At the University of Arizona Campus Agricultural Center, in the shadow of Tucson’s craggy Catalina Mountains, the traditionally planted Hopi cornfield is out of place. “This corn isn’t where it belongs,” says Michael Kotutwa Johnson, associate faculty in the Indigenous Resilience Center within the Arizona Institute for Resilience, and member of the Hopi tribe farming his ancestral land 300 miles north. “The corn and I are on a mission.” 

An informal, virtual public hearing process has begun for the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s proposed rule to establish a federal heat standard in the workplace.

Researchers Heidi Brown and Ladd Keith of AIR's Climate Assessment for the Southwest within the Arizona Institute for Resilience are working together with the Pima County Health Department to evaluate cooling centers – and finding solutions to help protect lives across the Southwest.

Capping off their participation in this year’s Ilíiaitchik: Indigenous Correspondents Program, six students traveled to Washington, D.C., in April to participate in the 2025 Planet Forward Summit at George Washington University.

Teenage Kacey Ernst, PhD, MPH, had her life figured out. She was going to save the world and the Amazon rainforest at the same time. Ernst is currently director of the Bridging Biodiversity and Conservation Science program within the Lovejoy Center at the Arizona Institute for Resilience.

Planning can go a long way toward reducing the negative health impacts of extreme heat on communities and their residents. Ladd Keith, a University Distinguished Scholar and associate professor in the University of Arizona College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture, has studied the human impact of extreme heat – and how governments can best respond – for nearly two decades.

Carnegie Science's Desert Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona served as an intellectual hub where pioneering ecologists helped transform the emerging discipline of ecology from descriptive natural history into a rigorous scientific field.