Cade Kane

2022 Fulbright U.S. Student Program Grantee

Hometown

West Lafayette, IN

Major

Botany and Plant Pathology

College

College of Agriculture

 

Cade Kane will soon be headed Down Under as a 2022 Fulbright U.S. Student Program grantee. As part of this prestigious program, Cade will join a cohort of about 2,000 other 2022 grantees who, with the support of Fulbright, will travel to over 160 countries to teach English, attend graduate school, or conduct research. While their motives for going abroad are diverse, Cade and his peers are united in their commitment to Fulbright’s driving mission to foster mutual understanding on a global scale.

In Tasmania, Australia, Cade will collaborate with individuals at the University of Tasmania to conduct important research towards his PhD in Botany and Plant Pathology. Cade’s dissertation examines the important and timely topic of how plants respond to climate change. He selected Australia and specifically Hobart in Tasmania as a geographical complement to West Lafayette. Both towns are equidistant from the equator—West Lafayette to the north, Hobart to the south—meaning that both locations experience the same seasonal daylight patterns. Hobart, however, is warmer than Indiana. Cade argues that studying Tasmanian forests will provide a window into the future of Indiana forests as temperatures continue to rise. His work promises to provide valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities such changes might bring.

While in Australia, Cade will also make time to build a community for himself at the University of Tasmania and in Hobart more broadly. He will continue his work as an advocate for climate change awareness by joining groups such as the Youth Climate Coalition, and he looks forward to sharing his midwestern values with everyone he meets while abroad. When he returns to the US, Cade will complete his PhD before pursuing a research-oriented career studying plant physiology.