A Cuban tree frog in the toilet. Iguanas taking over her school courtyard. A Burmese python in her neighbor’s yard. Elena Beck turned those encounters into a science fair project investigating how invasive species spread across Florida. Presenting her research at the State Science and Engineering Fair of Florida, she was thankfully not met with more invasive critters, but with the 2026 Florida Sea Grant Chuck Skoch Scholarship instead.
Funding for the Chuck Skoch Scholarship is provided by the Skoch family of Boynton Beach, in memory of Charles “Chuck” Skoch, an avid fisherman, boat captain, and Florida resident. Each year, Florida Sea Grant selects an outstanding high school senior competing in the State Science and Engineering Fair of Florida to receive the scholarship, which recognizes promising young researchers like Elena in coastal or marine science-related fields.
“Elena’s work reflects one of the most pressing topics in ecology today and highlights the interconnected nature of species responses across taxa,” says Brittany Scharf, Florida Sea Grant Hernando County Extension Agent and Skoch Scholar Judge. “It was particularly impressive to see a high school student engaging with work that is so directly relevant to both invasive and native species management, and something that connects to Extension programming across all silos, including my own work on thermal tolerance studies on common snook in Florida.”
Elena spent her childhood in Miami participating in coastal cleanups, trekking through mangroves, and building an early appreciation for the ecosystems now threatened by the very animals she studies. Impressively, she taught herself where to find the data, how to access it, and how to use it. Independently learning the methodology from the ground up, she sourced species occurrence records (where and when a species was observed) from EDDMapS and climate data from WorldClim. She utilized that and applied MaxEnt modeling to identify which environmental factors are most correlated with a species’ presence.
“It was significant that temperature-related factors were most strongly correlated with distribution spread”,” says Beck. “That makes sense, because they’re all ectotherms or cold-blooded animals that don’t produce their own heat, so they obviously depend on the warmth of tropical Florida.”
Because these species are already established across parts of the state, the model’s predictive abilities is valuable given the challenge that field teams alone can’t cover the ground needed to track these species in real time.
An IB student at Coral Reef Senior High School, Elena presents herself as a well-rounded student whose interest fits beyond the mold of generalized studies. She has taken courses in German, chemistry, humanities, and environmental sciences, and is a member of the Young Innovators Club, National Honor Society, Mu Alpha Theta, and Florida Future Educators of America. In the fall, she will attend Williams College, where she plans to pursue an interdisciplinary track in biology, geosciences and mathematics.
About Chuck Skoch Scholarship
The Chuck Skoch Florida Sea Grant Scholarship provides financial assistance to high school seniors in Florida who participate in the State Science and Engineering Fair. Students entering the fair with a project in aquaculture, environmental engineering, ocean engineering, wildlife, and fisheries management, food science (seafood), marine science, oceanography, or related to marine resource management are welcome to apply.
In 1997, the Charles Skoch family of Boynton Beach, Florida, created an endowment within the University of Florida Foundation, which funds a $1,000 per year Chuck Skoch Florida Sea Grant Scholarship. The first scholarship was awarded in 1998. In this program, a high school senior student is selected through competition in the Florida Annual State Science and Engineering Fair as conducted statewide by the Florida Foundation for Future Scientists.