Gretchen North Awarded Prestigious Percy Sladen Memorial Fund Grant

Equitech Futures is proud to celebrate Gretchen North, a 2024 Civic Tech Institute alumna from the United States, who has been awarded the 2026 Percy Sladen Memorial Fund grant from The Linnean Society of London.

The grant will support Gretchen's upcoming field expedition to Darién, Panama, where she will work alongside researchers from the University of Panama and the Complutense University of Madrid to catalogue earthworm diversity across protected tropical rainforest sites. Using integrative taxonomic methods, the project aims to deepen scientific understanding of invertebrate biodiversity and the patterns of endemism and invasion shaping Panama's heterogeneous tropical landscapes.

This recognition builds on the remarkable momentum of Gretchen's 2024–2025 Fulbright Student Researcher fellowship in Panama, during which she inaugurated the country's first national earthworm collection, now housed at the GB Fairchild Invertebrate Museum at the University of Panama. Over the course of ten months, she documented novel species occurrences, updated open-source taxonomic databases to support future research, and forged international research partnerships in Colombia and Mexico. For Gretchen, the work is about far more than science: it is environmental education, biodiversity monitoring, and rural community engagement.

Congratulations, Gretchen, on this well deserved recognition!