Laurel Bayless of Athens, Ohio, is graduating with honors Spring Semester with a major in Physical Geography and a minor in Spanish. In her last two years, she has served as an undergraduate research assistant in the Ice Core Paleoclimate Research Group at OSU’s Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. Laurel has explored the use of black carbon preserved in ice cores to reconstruct Alaska’s fire history, mastered the use of back trajectory analysis to track the source of snow precipitating on Andean glaciers, and examined the chemical and physical signatures of  El Niño and La Niña preserved in the ice on the world’s highest tropical glacier. She placed third in her category at the Annual Denman Undergraduate Research Forum. Laurel is deeply concerned about future impacts of global climate change and this year served as Vice President of OSU’s Sierra Coalition.