Growing up in Syracuse, New York, Lucy Heflin spent her childhood asking questions the forests couldn't quite answer on their own. Why did the trees grow only on that slope? Why was that rock red? What made that mountain so tall? Alongside that curiosity came something else: frustration. Hiking through the Adirondacks, Shenandoah, and the Smoky Mountains, she watched visitors treat public lands without the proper care.
She wanted to do something about it.
Those twin forces — wonder and responsibility — pointed Lucy toward natural resources. When it came time to choose a university, she picked a grand new adventure.
"I specifically chose OSU because it was far from my hometown of Syracuse, NY,” Lucy shared. “I had the chance to explore a new place on my own, which was really enticing."
As a freshman, Lucy reached out to Professor Matt Betts in the Forest Ecosystems & Society department. He connected her with PhD student Nina Ferrari, who hired her as a lab technician — a relationship Lucy credits as central to her undergraduate experience.
"Lucy is an extremely drive, curious, and enthusiastic emerging scientist," said Ferrari.
Lucy spent her first year labeling bioacoustics data for songbird research, then headed out to the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest (HJA) that summer for her first taste of field work.
She was hooked. Over the next two summers, Lucy returned as part of the avian point count crew, learning to identify roughly 60 to 80 bird species by sight and sound. The work sharpened her skills and clarified her interests: avian biology and landscape ecology.
During her sophomore and junior years, Lucy channeled that experience into an undergraduate honors thesis: her own original research using the HJA's long-term avian point count dataset to examine how the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire affected bird abundance in the forest. She defended it in the fall of her senior year, then submitted it to a peer-reviewed journal. She is currently working through revisions with hopes of publication.
"I am probably most proud of conducting my own research and writing a paper of the quality that it didn't get immediately rejected," she said. “As a close runner-up, I am also quite proud of learning to identify dozens of bird species at the HJA.”
Away from the lab and field, Lucy found community in the people around her. Coming from across the country, she leaned on friendships that became, in her words, a family away from home. The field crews at the HJA each summer offered another circle of belonging as colleagues who lived and worked alongside her through Oregon's remote forests.
This fall, Lucy begins a master's program at the University of Iowa in the Jones Quantitative Ecology Lab. Her research will focus on tagging and monitoring Mexican spotted owls in the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico, studying how the owls navigate the regions’ dry canyonlands. The work will be funded in part by Los Alamos National Laboratory, with the goal of informing conservation management on their lands.
Driven by a curiosity that started on the trail, Lucy Heflin is just getting started on a career she’s been building since her earliest days outdoors.