Edwin Medrano Email & Phone Number

Peekskill, New York, United States

This position was the program director for New Era Creative Space's Nature Connection Camp. Nature Connection Camp is a program for getting kids from the Peekskill area involved in being outdoors and other activities with a emphasize on getting connected with nature in many ways. The camp had approximately 14 students as well as two volunteer camp counselors and an assistant camp director. As the program director I was in charge of designing the curriculum for the month. The curriculum included scheduled trips such as to farms to learn about how to grow food, trips to go hiking and learn about local areas, as well as some lessons taught by art teachers and yoga instructors. I also included segments within the curriculum where the students and I could be outdoors at local parks and catch turtles, fish, and frogs that I could sit down with them and teach them about. I also incorporated Camera traps to study the local wildlife at the local park to help show the students the biodiversity we have here in New York.

New York City Metropolitan Area

Valley Cottage, New York, United States

Worked full time at a seasonal position at Rockland lake as a state park ranger. This position included performing bag checks on patrons before entering the pool area, monitoring the pool area, escorting patrons who violated the rules from the pool area, and identifying diseased trees for other staff to begin treatment or removal of said trees.

Bronx, New York, United States

Worked full time from the period of May 2018 to August 2018, and May 2019 to August 2019. The program was dedicated to getting high school students from local communities involved in urban ecology research. As an undergraduate field research mentor I designed two research projects, one for each summer I worked, for the teams of 4 to 5 students. My first project was a camera trapping study, where the students and I picked 8 locations along the Bronx River to place camera traps and conduct a biodiversity analysis of the Bronx River. The second project was focused on trapping turtles with hoop traps that were baited with fish. This project was focused on two objectives analyzing the impact that the dams within the river had on species composition, weight, and length of the turtles as well as analyzing the microbiomes presents within the turtles and comparing to see how similar native species' microbiomes were to that of invasive species present within the Bronx River. We took cotton swabs from the Turtle's cloacas and ran PCR analysis to identify the bacterial compositions found within the turtles. The species of turtles we worked with were Red-Eared Sliders, Painted Turtles, and Snapping Turtles.