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EEB Award Recipients

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EEB held its annual Awards Ceremony on May 2.  Please click on each recipient’s name to read about each deserving awardee.

Graduate Student Awards:

Undergraduate Student Awards:

Staff Awards:

 

Award Details

Outstanding Publication by a Graduate Student – Zach Marion

Zach Marion, Jim Fordyce and Ben Fitzpatrick. 2015. Extending the Concept of Diversity Partitioning to Characterize Phenotypic Complexity. American Naturalist 186:348-361
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/682369

Zach’s paper has already garnered substantial attention and provides a real methodological advancement for characterizing complex phenotypes. Zach’s coauthors emphasized that the paper was almost entirely his idea from beginning to end. The paper developed out of his experimental work on chemical defenses. Complex phenotypes, such as the cocktail of defensive compounds employed by plants and animals, are notoriously difficult to interpret in a concise manner. Zach developed an entirely novel approach for characterizing this within- and between-individual chemical complexity in terms of diversity, using mathematical techniques borrowed from community ecology. This approach to quantifying complexity provides a numeric value that is immediately interpretable in a biological framework. As part of that work, Zach also developed and released a software package hierDiversity that implements the approach. The software is freely available on the R CRAN repository. Zach plans to graduate in December, 2016.

Sandy Echternacht Outstanding Teaching by a Graduate Student – Ian Ware
Ian Ware has been a valued teaching assistant in our program for four years. He is always in demand as a GTA due to his diligence, skills and effective teaching style. He has taught Intro Biology, Ecology and was instructor of record for Ecosystem Ecology Lab in Fall 2014. He has been selected as head GTA for Ecology for the last three semesters because of his skills in organizing the labs, other GTAs, and for motivating all to excel in this field. Ian has been a fantastic mentor to over 12 undergraduates in field, greenhouse, and lab. He is great at connecting with students, using humor effectively to teach complicated concepts. He uses an array of inquiry-based teaching techniques in the field and lab and is fantastic at connecting classic ecological concepts with modern issues. He has also developed statistical modules in R, has been developing a list of classic ecology papers from the literature and has designed field experiments/modules to teach specific concepts in ecosystem ecology.

Outstanding Outreach & Community Service – Rachel Fovargue
Rachel Fovargue has consistently taken leadership roles, whether here at EEB, at UT, or in wider society through her conservation research and outreach. She has served as vice-president of GREBE, as graduate student representative on a faculty search committee, as a student representative on the Chancellor’s Sexual Misconduct Task Force, and as the Department’s grad student representative within the Senate. In addition to this campus leadership however, Rachel is also actively engaged with wider society. She actively engages with the end-user community for conservation research from nonprofits and public agencies, such as The Nature Conservancy. Also, the US Geological Survey regularly asks Rachel to work with teams of international conservation researchers as “coaches,” providing training sessions for conservation staff from relevant public agencies (Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, and others) in how to apply techniques from modern decision theory to enhance their wildlife management practices. Rachel’s outreach work with USGS is at the very forefront of seeing concepts from quantitative biology through to real-world application.

Outstanding Master’s Thesis – Nate Sutton
Nate Sutton finished his Master’s degree in 2014. He published two first-author papers from his Master’s thesis. The first came out in Conservation Biology that year, and the second came out this year in Biological Conservation. His research has combined careful statistics, novel spatial optimization techniques and rich interdisciplinary data and analyses to answer pressing real-world questions. Most importantly, his work delivers crucially important recommendations to improve conservation practice. Nate went on to work at the Environmental Sciences division at Oak Ridge and now works as a Data Scientist at Jvion in Atlanta.

Jim Tanner Outstanding Dissertation – Austin Milt
Austin Milt graduated in August 2015. He published three first-author papers in the Journal of Applied Ecology, Environmental Management and Conservation Biology and has another in review for Ecological Economics. The key contribution of his work was the development of conservation planning tools to help shale gas energy companies reduce the aboveground ecological impact of energy development by optimizing locations of infrastructure. Another aspect of his dissertation involved producing a software package that is being used by multiple energy developers, conservation organizations and public agencies already. The scientific contribution of Austin’s work was extremely novel and timely, and he also painstakingly involved stakeholders throughout all sections of his thesis. While at UT, he was bringing in many tens of thousands of dollars in primary research grants on top of numerous fellowships. Austin is currently a post-doc at University of Wisconsin, Madison, working with Pete McIntyre.

Best Progress Towards Dissertation – Michael Van Nuland
Michael’s independently-developed dissertation project takes a novel approach to understanding the ecological and evolutionary interactions between soils and plants and how this may facilitate (or not) tree species range shifts with a changing climate. With a series of field and common garden studies, Michael found that soils impose multiple selection gradients on plant traits across the geographic range of Populus angustifolia. His work has been supported by an NSF GRFP and recently by an NSF Doctoral Dissertation award. He has been a model teaching assistant and has mentored multiple undergraduates in Jen Schweitzer’s lab. He has presented talks at ESA and British Ecological Society, and got best student talk at last year’s Soil Ecology meetings. Furthermore, he has published four first-author manuscripts during this time, and at least four more are in the works for a spring 2017 graduation.

Thomas G. Hallam Appreciation Award – Zach Marion
This award is perhaps the highest acclaim a grad student can get, because the nomination comes from the EEB graduate students.  The award recognizes an individual for outstanding contributions towards improvement of the graduate experience.  GREBE wrote a glowing nomination for Zach Marion. First of all they mentioned mentorship: Zach has played an informal mentorship role for many of the current graduate students, devoting countless hours helping grads with statistical problems, as well as with general graduate school advice. “We highly appreciate the time he has taken with so many of us.” Second, despite not holding a formal GREBE office title, Zach has consistently served GREBE by hosting events such as Recruitment Weekend (3 years running), serving as a graduate representative on a faculty search committee, and volunteering on many fronts to ensure graduate needs and opinions are heard. Finally, Zach’s involvement in teaching statistics courses has been exemplary. Many students have benefited from his efforts both within and outside of the Bayesian statistics and Biometry courses, for which he has taught or been GTA.

Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award – Christian Yarber
Outstanding Undergraduate Poster Award – Christian Yarber
Christian is a fourth year EEB student. He joined the O’Meara lab last year and has been an active participant in lab meetings and hackathons. Christian proposed a research project on the effect of paedomorphosis (retention of juvenile traits, such as gills) on salamander evolution. He used a script to extract information on traits from the Encyclopedia of Life, and verified this information for hundreds of species. He then took a phylogeny (Pyron et al. 2013), calibrated it to time, and matched the species there to the species for which he had trait data. He then used a recently published method (Beaulieu and O’Meara, 2015) to investigate how paedomorphosis correlated with diversification and turnover rates. His work was categorized by care throughout: he was not trying to rush through it, but dug into the methods and results to make sure the conclusions he was drawing were biologically sensible and justified. Christian will be lead author when the work is written up and submitted to Evolution.

Undergraduate Award for Professional Promise – Patrick McKenzie
“Patrick is as good as any undergraduate that I have encountered in the EEB major program to date. He is right up there with our very, very best,” said mentor Paul Armsworth.  As a Haslam Scholar, a Baker Scholar and a National Merit scholar, Patrick appears routinely on the Dean’s list. He aced Dr. Armsworth’s Models in Biology class last year. He has actively pursued undergraduate research opportunities throughout his undergraduate time and in his summers. For example, this summer he is going to Harvard Forest for an REU; last summer, he volunteered as a research assistant on an ecology project in Scotland. He currently analyzing data on protected areas in the central and southern Appalachians and has been invited to present the results at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research in Asheville in April. Patrick is also very active in campus leadership through, for example, his leadership of UT’s Roosevelt Institute and his service on the University’s Undergraduate Research Advisory Council and Undergraduate Students’ Research Association.

Outstanding Undergraduate Award – Jacob Wessels
Jacob Wessels epitomizes the Outstanding Undergraduate. As a Chancellor’s Honors Program student, it is perhaps no surprise that Jacob is an excellent student.  He was recently honored as a Top Collegiate Scholar in Arts & Sciences at the Chancellor’s Honors Banquet, and he successfully completed his EEB Honors thesis on the biology of invasive Mediterranean geckos in Tennessee. His achievements extend outside the classroom; he was an instrumental part of the Naturalist Club getting back on its feet a couple years ago. Though he has been known to catch an occasional butterfly on Naturalist Club outings, and even though he worked with geckos for his thesis, migratory birds seem to have captivated him most. Jacob is already in the midst of field technician duties this summer, recovering geolocators from golden-winged and blue-winged warblers. Jacob has made the most of his EEB degree; he is someone we should all be proud of, and someone whose work we should look forward to reading in the very near future.

EEB Outstanding Administrative Service Award 2016 – Janice Harper
Janice is the first face of the department, greeting everyone who enters the EEB office.  She has the ability to interact well with faculty, students and, staff, has a consistently positive attitude, is dependable, and expresses a willingness to help.  Janice’s motto is “I can work with anyone.”  These attributes are shown during many of her duties for the department from coordinating departmental events and faculty functions (we call her the Party girl) to putting together faculty dossiers for tenure and promotion.  Most importantly, Janice serves as the Graduate Secretary for our department’s 60+ graduate students.  On a daily basis Janice handles numerous requests from these students, their mentors and committees, the Grad Affairs Committee and the Grad Recruiting Committee.  We are grateful for her effort – Janice is highly deserving of this award.

Pipeline: Vols for Women

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Many EEB grad students are part of the new student organization, Pipeline: Vols for Women in STEM.  EEB Department Head Susan Kalisz is their faculty mentor.

The UT Division of Student Life chose Pipeline for two awards:

  • New Organization of the Year 2016
  • Innovative Program of the Year 2016  (for their Annual Women in STEM Research Symposium)

Congratulations, and keep on inspiring new Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics!

STEM_Pipeline2.jpeg 

STEM_Pipeline

Division of Biology 2016 Grad Student Awards

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The Division of Biology has announced the winners of the 2016 Graduate Student Awards!  Congratulations, all!

Alexander Hollaender Graduate Fellowship:

  • The Alexander Hollaender Graduate Fellowship is made possible through an endowment fund contributed by Dr. and Mrs. Alexander Hollaender. In 1944, Dr. Hollaender established the Division of Biology at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and was its director until 1967. Hollaender had close ties to East Tennessee and expressed the wish that strong preference in awarding fellowships be given to students from this region. The Fellowship Committee will consider academic qualifications, geographical origin, and scientific/ professional promise.  The Fellowship awardees receive $6,000 for one academic year.

Rachel Wooliver (EEB, Schweitzer Lab)
Ian Ware (EEB, Bailey Lab)

Fite Award:

  • This $1000 award recognizes an outstanding graduate student in the Division of Biology who demonstrates professional promise through an excellent academic record and interest in research and scholarship.

Zach Marion (EEB, Fitzpatrick Lab)
Kristin Holbrook (BCMB)
Caroline Rempe (GST)

Cokkinias Award:

Arkadipta Bakshi (BCMB)

Biology Teaching Award:

Chelsi Cassilly (Micro)

 

NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship for Heberling

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Postdoc J. Mason Heberling (Kalisz Lab) has been awarded a two-year National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship.  The proposal, entitled “Leveraging ventures of herbarium data to track plant invasion processes: trait shifts, local adaptation, and rapid evolution,” was funded by NSF’s Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology, Interdisciplinary Research Using Biological Collections program.

The host institutions for this fellowship are the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the University of Tennessee Knoxville, and the sponsoring scientists are Dr. Stephen Tonsor (Carnegie) and Dr. Susan Kalisz (UT).  Heberling will use herbaria worldwide to track trait shifts of invasive plants in the Eastern US through space and time.

For more information, please read his abstract, below.  Congratulations, Mason!

ABSTRACT:

The globalization of human activities has reshuffled plant communities across the world, resulting in substantial environmental damage and economic losses. This research leverages centuries of biological collections alongside recent advances in functional trait ecology to understand fundamental plant invasion processes. The frequency and importance of trait shifts following plant introductions, the direction and rate of these potential trait changes, and the degree to which local adaptation influences invasion success remain largely unknown. This project utilizes the extensive collection of the herbarium of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, supplemented with specimens from other herbaria worldwide. These specimens of introduced and native Eastern US species, collected from early 1800s to today, are being used to measure traits relating to carbon gain, resource-use, reproductive/dispersal ability, and phenology across space and time. This novel approach allows the ability to track species trait shifts through space and time – a task that would otherwise be impossible without collections. Main research objectives include using these data to track phenotypic change through the course of plant invasion and assess the role of local adaption to understand and predict species success. Advancing the use of herbaria to the rising field of trait-based ecology will substantially expand existing global trait databases to facilitate research on fundamental biological questions at a large scale.

The training objectives of this fellowship include the development of skills associated with herbarium methods, recent statistical advancements, geographic information systems (GIS), and software development for efficient specimen georeferencing. Career development activities include building research collaborations, expanding past research to include herbarium data and evolutionary analyses, and encouraging diverse participation to highlight the importance of biological collections as a vital source of knowledge to the broader community. Despite availability and relevance, collections-based science has been reported on the decline. This project addresses this disconnect through interaction with community organizations in Western PA, including local elementary education programs and museum docent training.

McKenzie Receives Honorable Mention for Prestigious Scholarship

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Undergraduate Patrick McKenzie received an honorable mention in the highly prestigious Goldwater Scholarship program.  Students cannot apply directly for the scholarship; they must be nominated by their institution.  To be selected among all his peers at UT and then to receive an honorable mention at the national level is a testament to his promising research career potential.

Patrick also received an REU position at the Harvard Forest Summer REU program, working on a forest simulation modeling project.

The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program was established by Congress in 1986 to honor Senator Barry Goldwater, who served his country for 56 years as a soldier and statesman, including 30 years of service in the U.S. Senate.  The purpose of the Foundation is to provide a continuing source of highly qualified scientists, mathematicians, and engineers by awarding scholarships to college students who intend to pursue research careers in these fields.

Curt Richardson (PhD 1972): Alumni Update

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Curt Richardson (PhD 1972) is the second person ever to graduate from UT with a PhD in Ecology, and his career after graduating has been impressive!  This is what he had to say:

No question UT put me on the path to a remarkable career, first at the University of Michigan and then at Duke University for the past 38 years.  Tennessee in 1972 was only one of two Universities offering a PhD in Ecology, and with their strong program and ties to Oak Ridge National Lab it presented me with an unbelievable opportunity to do research in the NSF funded International Biological Program (IBP).  After completing my degree in physiological plant ecology with a minor in soils I was hired directly out of graduate school as an Assistant Professor of Ecology in the School of Natural Resources in Michigan. Postdocs were not required in ecology in those days as the number of graduates were few and the field was growing rapidly.  It was a wonderful school and unlike today money was readily available from NSF, so grants were readily available for research, especially in ecology.  While I was at Michigan, I moved from forestry research and  became interested  in wetlands ecology.  I  worked on one of the first major studies in the U.S. on the ecological and biogeochemical  effects of  waste water additions to wetlands at Houghton Lake Michigan.  My research, I can proudly say, showed that wetlands cannot  efficiently remove phosphorus from the water and that the natural wetland communities were greatly altered by the invasion of cattails.  Importantly, this research stopped EPA from approving the use of natural  wetlands for waste water treatment and thus the field  of constructed wetlands  was born.

After five years at Michigan I was offered a wonderful position to head up the ecology program at Duke’s School of Forestry and Environmental  studies.  This school later became the Nicholas School of the Environment in 1991.  While at Duke, I have been a Professor of Resource Ecology but have also  taken my turn at administrative duties.  Over the years I have been Ecology Program Chairman, Division chair of Ecosystem Science and Policy and even acting Dean of the School.  However, my first love is teaching and research where I have mentored over 150 masters more than 20 PhD students. Twenty-five years ago I founded the Duke University Wetland Center and currently still direct its research activities.  There is no doubt the ecological training and experiences given to me at UT by my professors while a graduate student in the Ecology Program at UT gave me the entree into a wonderful academic and research career in ecology at two great institutions.  

My  major research efforts have focused on wetlands as nutrient sinks and chemical transformers on the landscape.  Fortunately, I have  directed research on some of the most important wetland issues of our time, including long-term studies on the effects of nutrient phosphorus additions in wetlands in Michigan, Pocosin peatlands losses in North Carolina, the restoration of the Everglades of Florida and more recently scientific assessment of wetland restoration potential in the Iraq marshes. Since 2000 I have focused on restoring all the wetlands and streams on the Duke University campus and in 2007 the University dedicated 25 acres of the campus as SWAMP (Stream Wetland Management Assessment Park).  Currently, I  direct  research on  a large multi-institutional DOE grant on carbon sequestration and GHG losses in peatlands (Minnesota to Panama), and I am  a CO-PI in the nanomaterials project (NSF CEINT Center) where I  direct research on nanomaterial effects on wetland plants and water chemistry.

I have  authored or co-authored  over 175 peer-reviewed papers.  Recent books include “Methods in Biogeochemistry of Wetlands in 2013 and  “The Everglades Experiments: Lessons for Restoration in 2008. I have  been listed in Who’s Who in Science annually since 1989 and was elected President of the Society of Wetland Scientists in 1987-88. In 2006, I  received the National Wetlands Scientist of the Year Award from the Environmental Law Institute.  I am an elected  Fellow of the Society of Wetland Scientists, the Soil Science Society of America, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I  received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of wetland Scientists in 2013.  Importantly,  these career achievements  cannot outshine the real value  of having the opportunity to work  with great students and people over the past four decades.

John Reynolds (PhD 1973): Alumni Update

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John Reynolds (PhD 1973) was the third person to receive a PhD from the Ecology program at UT.  It is thanks to his input that the department has an alumni blog!  This is what he had to say:

The attached article captures my scientific research up to 2012.  In April, I published a major paper on Tennessee earthworms and will publish another in about one year.  Earthworm research is only one of 12 disciplines in which I have published and these have been published in whole or in part in 51 languages in 55 different publications totaling over 350 articles and books.  Earthworm research has been a family affair as I have co-authored 3 papers with my wife (Wilma), one with my eldest daughter (Kristin) in French, 10 with our middle daughter (Deborah) (9 in Spanish and one in English and Japanese), and one with our youngest daughter Jennifer.  Wilma and I have been married for over 50 years and we returned to Canada in 1973 from Knoxville where our eldest daughter was born. The next two daughters were born in Fredericton, New Brunswick; each daughter has two children.

After graduation from UT I worked for Tall Timbers Research Station for three years. Then I was an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Forestry at UNB Fredericton for 3 years.  I sold my earthworm collection to the Canadian National Museum (six countries bid for the right to purchase it).  With the proceeds we bought a house and I retired for 3 years to complete a law degree.  After which I joint the Fredericton Police Force for 10 years, 5 as a Constable and 5 as an Inspector where I taught at all the Police Academies across Canada.

I was then asked to apply for the position of Dean of Resource Technology at Sir Sanford Fleming College. I won the competition as served for 6 years until the government changed and education and health budgets were severely reduced.  For a year I consulted on various projects in Canada, Bermuda, Argentina and the United States.  Consulting on short term projects was stressful, wondering where the next job would arise.

I studied for a commercial licence and went to work for Schneider National in Green Bay, one year as a driver, 6 months as a trainer and then 7 and a half years as a manager.  At the age of 65, I decided it was time to stop working for others and we used the office and lab in our house for consulting which I am still doing today. 

Aside from my research work, I have been very active in the various Masonic Orders serving as the District Deputy Grand Master in all Orders.  During the non-winter months, I am an avid lawn bowler.