Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

Classen

EEB Departmental Awards 2017

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Congratulations to all the graduate students, undergraduate students, and staff who received awards at the EEB Awards Ceremony on May 1.   To view more photos, please visit the EEB Facebook page.  For more information about any of the awards below, please visit the Departmental Awards and Scholarships page.

2017 EEB Outstanding Master’s Thesis
Alix Pfennigwerth (Schweitzer Lab)

2017 EEB Jim Tanner Outstanding Dissertation
Michael Van Nuland (Schweitzer Lab)

2017 EEB Best Progress Toward Dissertation
Sam Borstein (O’Meara Lab)

2017 EEB Sandy Echternacht Outstanding Teaching by a Graduate Student
Tyson Paulson (Fordyce Lab)

2017 EEB Outstanding Publication by a Graduate Student
Rachel Wooliver (Schweitzer Lab)

2017 EEB Tom Hallam Appreciation Award
Angela Chuang (Riechert Lab)

2017 EEB Outstanding Outreach and Community Service by a Graduate Student
Alannie-Grace Grant (Kalisz Lab)

2017 Outstanding Undergraduate Poster Award
Sarah Ottinger (Classen Lab)

2017 EEB Outstanding Undergraduate
Patrick McKenzie (Armsworth Lab)

2017 EEB Outstanding Undergraduate Research
Hannah Anderson (Riechert Lab)

2017 EEB Undergraduate for Professional Promise
Katie Plant (Williams Lab)

2017 EEB Outstanding Outreach and Community Service by an Undergraduate Student
Heiler Meek (Schweitzer Lab)

2017 EEB Outstanding Administrative Service Award
Marva Anderson

Going Above and Beyond Award
Jess Welch (Simberloff & McCracken Labs)

Fulbright for Rewcastle (BS 2015)

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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.

Moorhead awarded NSF GROW grant

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Leigh Moorhead, a graduate student in the Classen Lab, was recently awarded a Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide (GROW) grant from the NSF for her project: Exploring how mammal herbivore – plant community interactions shape ecosystem response to global change.

GROW grants are available to recipients of NSF GRFPs and provide students opportunities for international research.

Congratulations Leigh!

Best Paper in Theoretical Ecology

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Jiang Jiang (NIMBioS fellow and Classen Lab postdoc) and Don DeAngelis (adjunct) have received the Ecological Society of America’s 2014 Outstanding Ecological Theory Paper Award.  Their winning paper,  “Strong species-environment feedback shapes plant community assembly along environmental gradients,” was published in the journal Ecology and Evolution in 2013 (3: 4119–4128).

“In their clearly-written paper, the authors make direct linkages to problems in plant ecology, while building a general theoretical model that addresses a key issue, not just in plant ecology, of feedbacks between organisms and their environment. Through well-designed analyses of an elegant model, they found that “ecological engineers” (species that modify the environment to their own benefit) can affect the diversity of the competitive community they inhabit, and that the direction of this effect depends critically on the extent to which the community is closed to immigration and on the spatial heterogeneity of the environment. These novel results should are likely to foster further theoretical research and generate some fine hypotheses that will motivate experimental and field studies.”

“The Theoretical Ecology Section of the Ecological Society of America sponsors an annual award for an outstanding published paper in ecological theory.  Papers with a print or electronic publication date in either of the two years preceding the year of the award are eligible.”

Sigma Xi Grant-in-Aid of Research

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Kenna-RewcastleEEB Undergraduate Kenna Rewcastle has won a highly-competitive Sigma Xi Grant-in-Aid of Research award.  Only about 20% of applicants receive funding.  Kenna is working with the Classen Lab in Copenhagen. She will be working on the Swedish gradient this summer.

 

 

DOE Grant for Classen

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Aimee Classen has received more than $880,000 from the U.S. Department of Energy to investigate often-overlooked carbon cycle players.

She and her team will examine factors that influence carbon cycling below the ground and are not included in today’s carbon-cycle models, such as bacteria and fungi.

For more information about Classen’s proposed research, read the full TN Today article.  Her research was also picked up by the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

Costa Rica field course

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Faculty Aimee Classen and Nate Sanders taught a Maymester class in Costa Rica focusing on suitability issues. In addition to visiting many farms and conducting field experiments, students conducted trail maintenance in Monteverdi.

costa

Sarah Wood awarded Sigma Xi grant

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Undergraduate student, Sarah Wood (Classen Lab), was awarded a Sigma Xi grant in aid of research (http://www.sigmaxi.org/programs/giar/) for her undergraduate thesis work on how ants in Colorado alter ecosystem processes. Only 30% of ecological applications are awarded and most of these go to graduate students. Sarah will be spending part of her summer in Alaska working as a summer researcher in microbial ecology, but will come back to finish up her work on ants.