Holli Nicole CappsPronouns: she/her/ella
University of Florida
Adviser: Dr. Peter Waylen
Focus Area: Earth System Science
Research Statement: My research interests include climate science and hydro-climatology broadly, and specifically rainfall and streamflow variability, and extreme precipitation. I am interested in looking at daily to annual scales as well as inter and intra-variability. I use meteorological station data as well as numerical and probabilistic approaches to study or evaluate potential changes over time and space of these hydrological phenomena.
Who is she?
Holli Capps is a second year Master’s student in the Geography Department. A Florida native of Venezuelan descent on her mom’s side, Holli completed a B.S. in Environmental Science with a minor in Geography at the University of Florida in 2019.
How did she get here?
Growing up in Wakulla County on Florida’s Forgotten Coast, Holli always had an appreciation for nature and the environment, and a fascination for extreme weather. After Holli took AP Environmental Science in high school, she fell in love with climate change and science. Holli’s biological Dad is a big FSU fan, but she always knew she was a Gator at heart. When she graduated from High School, Holli followed her passion for climate science to the Environmental Science department. Eventually, Geography provided the avenue to tie all of these interests together.
As a first generation student from a part of the state with extremely limited technology resources, Holli has had extra hurdles to overcome to succeed in graduate school. These include but are not limited to: navigating academic bureaucracy, learning advanced technologies like R and GIS, and tackling remote sensing someday soon.
What’s she been doing at UF?
As part of her bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science and the Certificate in Meteorology and Climatology, Holli took Dr. Pete Waylen’s GEO 3280 Principles of Geographic Hydrology while a sophomore. In a small class filled with Engineering majors and grad students, Holli felt out of her depth. She asked lots of questions and spent nearly every day in Dr. Waylen’s office hours. Her hard work paid off – Dr. Waylen invited Holli to join the department as an undergraduate researcher, which led to her first publication Predicting monthly streamflows and their variability from limited historic records in the Tárcoles watershed, Costa Rica.
After completing her undergrad, Holli joined the Department of Geography as a Master’s student in Fall 2019 and has enthusiastically jumped into grad school. She has come full circle – teaching GEO 2242 Extreme Weather – the first geography class she ever took.
She’s also kept up a rigorous research agenda, publishing Interannual Variability in Daily Characteristics of Winter Precipitation at Tallahassee, 1949 – 2016 in The Florida Geographer in November of 2019, which won ‘Best Paper’ at the 2019 Florida Society of Geographers meeting. She presented Regionalization of Annual Precipitation in Ghana at the meeting of the Florida Society of Geographers 2020 meeting in February,
How has she been holding up during the pandemic?
Holli is fortunate to have a stable household with roommates – all of whom are able to work and go to school from home. It’s been emotionally exhausting, but Holli is doing lots of self care, like watching movies with her roommates, eating buffalo wings, and hanging out with her cat, Nala.
Credit: Mike Ryan Simonovich