If Boise State University is a glacier full of opportunities, then Madelyn Woods is making the most of its academic runoff. The environmental science senior and Honors College student has added four minors over the course of her undergraduate career — climate studies, sustainability, biology and geospatial information analysis — and her academic journey is just getting started.
This rich portfolio of qualifications supports her interest in cryospheric studies, a discipline ripe with opportunities for lab and field work in the School of the Environment and Department of Geosciences.
Woods works as an undergraduate research assistant in Associate Professor Ellyn Enderlin’s lab, studying glaciers across the Mountain West and into Western Canada. These glaciers accumulate snow and ice throughout the winter and release it as the weather warms, providing much-needed water for mountainous regions.
With the help of her mentor, Enderlin, Woods won an Undergraduate Research Scholarship from Boise State’s Institute for Inclusive and Transformative Scholarship in spring 2026. The funding will support Woods’s research into the factors that influence how glaciers grow and shrink throughout the year.
“The snowline kind of dictates how far your glaciers can advance or retreat,” Woods said. More snowfall lower in elevation helps glaciers grow, and vice versa. “If [snow] is not falling where it’s supposed to every year, it’s just going to keep retreating.”
With funding from her undergraduate research scholarship, Woods will study Western Canadian glaciers to understand what factors influence their melting. She will use data from an intergovernmental organization and a workflow developed by one of Enderlin’s former Ph.D. students.
Woods expects to see that climate zones will have a strong impact on how glaciers melt. “I would expect to see that climate has a bigger impact on those snowlines than elevation, latitude, longitude or just precipitation in general,” she said.
For Woods, glaciers and snowfall are more than just data points in a spreadsheet. Growing up in Star, Idaho, she had a clear view of the snowfall at Bogus Basin and across the Boise Mountains. An avid skier, she can’t resist an opportunity to examine the snowpack up close.
“I stop my boyfriend every five seconds,” she joked. “I’m like, ‘Gosh, check out this aspect. Why is this side so much denser?’ Everyone around me gets endless facts about [snow] because I can’t stop seeing things once I learn about them.”
The passion for glaciology means that Woods is already planning her future after graduation. She is currently a semifinalist in the Fulbright scholarship program. Scholarship funding would help her pursue a master’s degree at the University of Waterloo, working with their glaciology team to continue her studies in the field.
After a master’s program and, later, a Ph.D., Woods sees herself working as a climatologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Ever since I learned about them in, like, seventh grade, I wanted to work for the NOAA,” she said. “I wanted to fly on a little helicopter into the middle of a hurricane. I wanted to do anything that’s weather or climate-system related.”
Boise State has provided Woods with the resources to make those seventh grade dreams a reality. Support from the Honors College, hands-on learning opportunities with the School of the Environment and mentoring from her professors have all contributed to her success.