Graduate student Erim Gomez has spent the past few years at WSU studying a native Northwest species soon to become a ghost of the region: the northern leopard frog.

The amphibian once thrived in about 17 areas of Washington.

“Now, they’re only in one location: the Moses Lake area,” Gomez said. “Which is kind of odd, because if you look at it, it’s not what you would consider their ideal habitat.”

Gomez intends to discover why the species has diminished to the point of endangerment before it disappears from Washington.

Now, with a little funding help, Gomez will be able to expand his lab and field work during the next two years.

In August, he became the first WSU student to win a fellowship award from the Bullitt Foundation, an environmental conservation group that focuses on the Pacific Northwest. Along with the award comes a $100,000 grant to fund Gomez’s project for the next two years.

The award goes out each year to one graduate student who shows environmental leadership throughout the region, according to a foundation press release.

The selection committee was impressed with Gomez’s perseverance through a personal tragedy that came about during his time in grad school, said Denis Hayes(CQ), the president of the foundation.

The committee also took into account Gomez’s humble background as the son of two immigrant parents from Mexico and a first-generation college student.

“When anyone’s going to college, whether you’re first generation or not, everyone is just getting adjusted to life,” he said.

First-generation college students like him just have more adjustments to make, Gomez said. His parents taught him that he would have to work his way through school instead of getting student loans. Sure enough, Gomez has done just that.

In his sophomore year, he started working long hours.

“Trying to maintain good grades while working 25 to 35 hours a week in sciences is a little difficult,” Gomez said. “Not only difficult; I wasn’t able to do it. I was struggling to pay my bills and take science courses at the same time."

For about a year, he worked as a janitor from 4 to 8 a.m. before shipping off to work at an internship for the ecology center at Southern Oregon University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree. He had a scholarship to pay for tuition.

“I was barely able to pay my bills,” Gomez said.

Now, Gomez looks forward to the possibilities of what he might accomplish with his funding boost during the next two years. He has already begun hiring assistants for the project.

Gomez and his adviser, Rodney Sayler, an associate professor in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences, are also working on breeding the frogs in captivity on campus. So far, a couple outbreaks of the devastating chytrid fungus have delayed their progress.

“It pretty much makes their skin slough off,” Gomez said. “Yeah, not a good thing.”

The fungus is one of the prime causes of the frog’s struggle to survive in the wild of the Northwest, too, Gomez said.

Despite the fact that it is not their optimal habitat, he suspects the frogs are able to survive in Moses Lake area because it has so much land

Gomez began his work with the northern leopard frog when he came to WSU in 2007 and met Sayler, who introduced him to the species. Since then, he has developed an affinity for amphibians.

“One of the cool things about amphibians is that they don’t necessarily get the attention that other fauna does because they’re maybe not as cute and cuddly as an endangered pigmy rabbit or a sage grouse,” he said. “But they do serve as an indicator species. That is, they’re usually one of the first species to go out of a system when there are issues in the system.”

Sayler is proud of Gomez for winning the award, and he can see Gomez going far in his work from this point on.

“He’s been very active and he’s got tremendous potential to be an environmental leader,” he said