Mosquito research draws KSU environmental science major to the woods for the summer

Somewhere in the mosquito-thick woods outside Hattiesburg, Mississippi, a Kennesaw State University senior named Brooklyn Galvan is doing something most people would pay good money to avoid. She’s out there on purpose — swatting, sweating, and collecting data on insects that the rest of us treat as a seasonal inconvenience. And in 2026, that work is more consequential than it sounds. According to Kennesaw State University, Galvan is conducting research into mosquitoes as pollinators as part of the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates for Gulf Coastal Plains Ecology. That framing — mosquitoes as pollinators, not just pests — is the entire point.

The facts:

• Brooklyn Galvan is a KSU environmental science major and a 2025 Birla Carbon Scholar.
• Her research is funded through the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates program, focused on Gulf Coastal Plains Ecology.
• Galvan’s fieldwork is based near Hattiesburg, Mississippi, for the summer of 2026.
• Her undergraduate lab work was conducted under KSU Assistant Professor of Microbiology Andrew Haddow, who studies mosquito roles in ecosystems.
• Galvan discovered the opportunity independently and brought it to Dr. Haddow, who helped her through the application process.

Why Does Anyone Care Whether Mosquitoes Pollinate?

Most people’s mental model of a mosquito is simple: it bites you, it might give you something terrible, you kill it. The idea that a mosquito might be doing the same job as a honeybee — transferring pollen, supporting plant reproduction, holding up some quiet corner of an ecosystem — doesn’t fit the narrative we’ve built around them. That’s precisely why it matters.

Mosquitoes are among the most studied insects on the planet, almost entirely through the lens of disease. Malaria. Dengue. West Nile. The research money follows the fear. What gets left behind is the fuller ecological picture — the one where a creature you despise is also doing quiet, unglamorous work that ecosystems depend on. Galvan’s research pushes against that tunnel vision. Mosquitoes as pollinators is not a fringe theory. It is an underexplored scientific reality that deserves serious attention, and undergraduate field researchers like Galvan are among the few people actually pursuing it at this scale.

This kind of student-driven fieldwork is exactly what the scientific community needs more of, and it’s not happening in a vacuum. Binghamton University’s Natural Environmental Change Center awarded five graduate student grants and two faculty seed grants in 2025 and 2026 to support environmental research across multiple disciplines. Associate Professor of Earth Sciences Molly Patterson, co-director of the center, put it plainly: “Collaborative research matters because it combines expertise no single researcher has.” That institutional commitment to funding early-career researchers is the scaffolding that makes moments like Galvan’s Mississippi summer possible. Without the NSF program, without Haddow’s mentorship, without the broader culture of supporting environmental science students in the field, this research simply doesn’t happen.

There’s a direct line between this kind of hands-on, place-based science and the bigger policy conversations happening around environmental accountability. Carbon emissions trading and environmental accountability in manufacturing get the headlines and the political oxygen. But the foundational data that makes any of that policy defensible comes from people standing in the woods counting mosquitoes and pressing flowers into specimen bags.

What Does It Actually Mean to Train the Next Generation of Environmental Scientists?

The honest answer is: it looks like this. It looks like a college senior stumbling onto an NSF opportunity, sending it to her professor, and ending up in Mississippi for a summer with bug spray and a research question nobody handed her. Galvan found this program herself. That detail, buried in the KSU interview, says everything about how science careers actually form — less structured pipeline, more series of open doors that someone bothered to walk through.

Florida A&M University’s School of the Environment took a different approach to the same goal. Eight representatives from FAMU’s program visited Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in 2026 to see firsthand how DOE-level research translates their classroom knowledge into real-world environmental problem-solving. Touring the Grid Storage Launchpad, watching researchers monitor the national electric grid — that’s a different flavor of environmental science education than Galvan’s fieldwork, but it’s chasing the same thing: the moment when abstract academic training collides with something that is actually happening, right now, in the physical world.

These are not competing models. They’re complementary ones. Some students need to see the inside of a national lab to understand what a scientific career looks like. Others need to be handed a net and sent into the underbrush. Summer fellowships across disciplines — from Alzheimer’s research to AI infrastructure — are increasingly where the real intellectual formation happens, not in lecture halls. The classroom gives you the vocabulary. The field gives you the question.

What Galvan is doing is easy to underestimate if you don’t think too hard about it. She’s spending her summer being bitten by the subjects of her own research. She brought the opportunity to her mentor, not the other way around. And she’s producing data on a creature’s ecological role that most scientists haven’t bothered to look at. Somewhere in those Mississippi woods, a mosquito lands on a flower. Galvan watches. She writes it down.