Robert McDonald is one of two college students awarded participation in the University of Rhode Island science/journalism workshop.

McDonald is a graduate student in the University Program in Ecology at Duke University, where he is a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, a James B. Duke Fellow for Academic Excellence, and a Bill and Melinda Gates Fellow for Interdisciplinary Research. His research interests center around the response of ecosystems to habitat fragmentation, and particularly the response of forests to urban sprawl and land-use change.

He has studied and collaborated on topics as diverse as successional patterns in southeastern forests, tree growth near forest edge, spread of invasive species in fragmented landscapes, spatial patterns of urban development, and the economic valuation of greenspace in an urban setting. This past summer he served as a Science and Policy Intern at the National Academies of Science, where he assembled a workshop on the partitioning of direct and indirect human effects on terrestrial carbon sequestration.