Did you know that 25% of our graduate students are self-funded? In Academic Year 2015-16, 14 of our 56 grad students brought in a combined total of over $300k in funding from the following sources:
Rachel Wooliver (Schweitzer Lab) won the 2016 SSSA Francis and Evelyn Clark Soil Biology Scholarship from the Soil Science Society of America (one of two awarded every year). The fellowship will support the work titled: Understanding plant responses to nitrogen deposition through coevolved interactions with soil fungi. Congratulations, Rachel!
Kenna Rewcastle, a 2015 graduate in the College Scholars program, has been awarded a Fulbright US Student Program Grant for 2016–17. She will be going to Sweden to complete research on the impact of climate change on the food source for reindeer herds managed by the Sami indigenous people. Rewcastle, of Apison, Tennessee, who was also a Haslam Scholar as an undergraduate, spent the last year researching climate change as a laboratory and field technician with UT’s Classen Ecosystem Ecology Lab, which was helping with a project funded by the Department of Energy. She also has worked in labs in Denmark, China, Sweden, and Switzerland.
In total, four UT students were awarded Fulbright Grants this year. Read the full press release at TN Today.
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:
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.
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:
Congratulations, and keep on inspiring new Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics!
The Division of Biology has announced the winners of the 2016 Graduate Student Awards! Congratulations, all!
Rachel Wooliver (EEB, Schweitzer Lab)
Ian Ware (EEB, Bailey Lab)
Zach Marion (EEB, Fitzpatrick Lab)
Kristin Holbrook (BCMB)
Caroline Rempe (GST)
Arkadipta Bakshi (BCMB)
Chelsi Cassilly (Micro)
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.
Justin Hendy (Small Lab) received an award for Outstanding Graduate Teaching during the 2016 Graduate and Professional Student Appreciation Week at UT. He received the award for his work as the BioLit 150 head teaching assistant. To quote the program from the award ceremony:
“Justin has taught Biology 150 discussion sections and has served as the head teaching assistant for the last three semesters. His leadership extends to not only preparing the GTAs each week, but also to making revisions and changes to the curriculum as needed. He is a caring and thoughtful teacher and an excellent organizer / leader.”
Congratulations, Justin!
Professor Susan Riechert has received the 2016 SEC Faculty Achievement Award! The SEC award recognizes professors from the fourteen Southeastern Conference schools with outstanding records in teaching and scholarship. Honorees from each university receive a $5,000 honorarium and become their university’s nominee for the SEC Professor of the Year award. To view the full press release, click here.
http://tntoday.utk.edu/2016/03/30/riechert-receives-2016-sec-faculty-achievement-award/