Welcome Madeleine Thompson, our new Communications & Development Fellow

Welcome Madeleine Thompson, our new Communications and Development Fellow, who joins us as part of the O’Neill Service Corps Program. The O’Neill Service Corps is a program of the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, which leverages Federal Work Study funds to provide graduate students the opportunity to contribute to the public management, economic development, environmental policy, arts management, and human service needs of the Bloomington community and surrounding areas.

Madeleine graduated in May 2021 from Saint Louis University with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Biology focusing on Ecology and Conservation. During her studies, she worked as an Undergraduate Researcher in the Camilo Billiken Bee Lab at Saint Louis University and compiled a comprehensive database of studies on bees and urban environments. She was also a Summer Intern at the St. Louis Zoo in both the Institute for Conservation Medicine and the Primate House. In these internships, she collected species presence data of turtles via trapping, conducted radiotelemetry, health assessments, and camera trapping on wildlife to map movement and health in relation to human disturbance, and was responsible for maintaining the health and wellbeing of animals. Her passion for conservation has led her to pursue a dual master’s degree in Public Affairs and Environmental Science at IU beginning this fall. “I hope to protect the diverse natural world so that the connection between humans, wildlife, and nature can continue to spark in all,” she says.

Madeleine will be assisting Sycamore with communications and fundraising projects as well as getting involved with land stewardship work, including helping to inventory our database of wildlife camera footage to create a baseline in the Beanblossom Creek Bicentennial Conservation Area to measure the impact of upcoming wetland restoration projects. She can be reached at events@sycamorelandtrust.org. We are very excited to welcome her to the team!