EEB Award Recipients

May 5, 2016 by armsworth

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:

• Outstanding Publication by a Graduate Student ($500) – Zach Marion (Fitzpatrick Lab)
• Sandy Echternacht Outstanding Teaching by a Graduate Student ($500) – Ian Ware (Bailey Lab)
• Outstanding Outreach & Community Service ($500) – Rachel Fovargue (Armsworth Lab)
• Outstanding Master’s Thesis ($500) – Nate Sutton (Armsworth Lab)
• Jim Tanner Outstanding Dissertation ($500) – Austin Milt (Armsworth Lab)
• Best Progress Towards Dissertation ($500) – Michael Van Nuland (Schweitzer Lab)
• Thomas G. Hallam Appreciation Award ($500) – Zach Marion (Fitzpatrick Lab)

Undergraduate Student Awards:

• Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award ($250) – Christian Yarber (O’Meara Lab)
• Outstanding Undergraduate Poster Award ($250) – Christian Yarber (O’Meara Lab)
• Undergraduate Award for Professional Promise ($250) – Patrick McKenzie (Armsworth Lab)
• Outstanding Undergraduate Award ($250) – Jacob Wessels (Kwit Lab)

Staff Awards:

• EEB Outstanding Administrative Service Award 2016 – Janice Harper

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.