WKU News

For Ava Lich, science isn’t just a subject—it’s part of her everyday life. Raised in Windyville, Kentucky, a town she describes as "having more cows than people," Ava grew up exploring the fields, forests, and caves that surrounded her. Living just 15 minutes from Mammoth Cave National Park, she spent much of her childhood outdoors, whether playing in the woods on her family’s cattle farm or hiking the trails of the world’s longest cave system.

“I was outside a lot as a kid, whether I was playing on the farm, in the woods that we had on our property, or going and hiking in Mammoth Cave,” Ava says. “And, I mean, later in high school, I did volunteer work at Mammoth Cave, and that’s really where my love for it started. That’s where I’m doing my research now, and also where my love for geology and biology really stemmed from.”

Ava’s passion for science deepened during her time at the Gatton Academy of Mathematics and Science, an elite residential high school housed at Western Kentucky University (WKU). Through Gatton, she gained early exposure to advanced coursework, hands-on research, and a network of peers equally driven by curiosity and discovery.

Now a full-time student at WKU, Ava is majoring in Geology, Mathematics, and Biology—a rare and demanding combination that reflects her curiosity and love for discovery. She has already earned recognition for her research, becoming the inaugural recipient of the Mahurin-Crawford Research Fellowship, a cooperative effort between the Mahurin Honors College and Crawford Hydrology Lab that supports undergraduate research leading to an Honors thesis.

Her project will be the fourth thesis developed from the fellowship since 2022, and she joins a growing group of Honors students conducting environmental research both locally and abroad—including an international project in Mexico.

Ava always knew she loved nature and science, but she hadn’t quite figured out how that translated into a college major—until an HON 251 assignment changed her perspective.

“I had an assignment in HON 251 to interview somebody in our future career field and I picked Dr. Chris Groves,” she recalls. “I had never met him before, and when I went to his office, he had papers stacked up so tall on his desk, and he was wearing a hoodie and casual clothes and he had just come back from the cave.”

Dr. Groves, a WKU distinguished professor and hydrologist, is known for his groundbreaking work on karst landscapes, including Mammoth Cave. What Ava thought would be a simple assignment ended up shaping her entire academic path.

“He just told me about how he was helping people get access to clean water and all the work that he did in China to be able to get people access to clean water. And then he told me about all the research that he does with students, and I came out of that meeting being like ‘okay – I need to figure out how to be a geology major.’”

Ava’s deep connection to Mammoth Cave has been at the core of her academic journey. Now, her research focuses on the hydrology and environmental conditions of Mammoth Cave, an opportunity that allows her to work directly in the place that first inspired her. “The overall goal is to be able to calculate how much carbon is captured by limestone dissolution,” she says. “As limestone is dissolved in water there is carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere and calculating how much carbon is removed from the environment in this area in Mammoth Cave is very important” to our understanding of climate change and its effects on our environment.

With three majors spanning the sciences and mathematics, Ava is drawn to the ways these fields overlap. Rather than seeing them as separate disciplines, she sees them as pieces of the same puzzle. “I don't want to limit myself to one certain thing. I love doing all kinds of different things, and I love being multidisciplinary,” she says, adding that, “I think that they work really well together. Math works with any science beautifully.” She even taught herself fundamentals of computer science programming to be able to analyze her data.

Ava’s research has already earned her the opportunity to represent her departments and WKU at the recent Posters at the Capitol event, a prestigious event where undergraduate researchers share their work with Kentucky legislators. She was also recently selected as a ‘lightning round’ presenter at this event – an opportunity to give a 3-4 minute presentation about her work to the attendees. This kind of public presentation is an important step for young researchers, giving them the chance to showcase their work and make connections in the scientific community.

As Ava nears graduation in May 2025, she has already secured her next step—a full-time job at Extrakt Process Solutions LLC, a Bowling Green-based startup focused on sustainable solutions in liquid separation technology.  “I’ll be working full-time with them after I graduate,” she says. “It’s great because it connects with what I’ve been doing in my research.”

Between her undergraduate research, fieldwork in Mammoth Cave, and upcoming Honors thesis, Ava is already making a name for herself in the world of geosciences. Her journey—from playing in the woods near her family’s farm to conducting cutting-edge environmental research—is just beginning.

And for Ava, that’s exactly where she wants to be.