Featuring faculty member Maria Uriarte.
The E3B department is delighted to announce that Dr. Sian Kou-Giesbrecht has won the 2021 Don Jay Melnick Award!
Named in honor of one of the founders of our department, the Melnick Award recognizes outstanding dissertation work and other departmental activities. Using an uncommonly wide array of techniques, Sian’s thesis overturned a long-held belief. Prior to her work, nitrogen-fixing trees were thought to be a boon to climate mitigation. The idea was that their rapid growth and ability to fertilize the surrounding soil led to greater carbon storage…
Check out the New York Times article “The 1,000-Year Secret That Made Betta Fish Beautiful” that features the work of E3B Assistant Professor Andrés Bendesky!
You can also learn more about this in The Atlantic article “The Surprise Hiding in the DNA of Pet Fish.”
Both of these features cover the work Bendesky and his team have done on the genetics of domestication of betta fish, that came out in bioRxiv at the end of April.
Congratulations to E3B MA student Sarah Trabue on winning 2nd place in the University SynThesis competition!
Deren Eaton, Ph.D., assistant professor of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology, has been awarded the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, the NSF’s highest honor awarded to early career faculty. The five-year $956K grant will support his proposal “Linking Phylogenetic Inference at Genome-wide and Local Genealogical Scales”.
Eaton’s research combines computational genomics and bioinformatics with field-based studies of diverse and hybridizing plant species to examine the evolutionary consequences of hybridization…
Columbia has announced the creation of the Columbia Climate School, with E3B Professor Ruth DeFries named as Co-Founding Dean.
Ruth will remain a University Professor and Denning Family Professor of Sustainable Development in E3B, as well as continue to play an integral role in the Undergraduate Program in Sustainable Development at Columbia’s Earth Institute. Her world-renowned scholarship is committed to understanding the changes experienced by the planet over the course of human existence. She is also a public advocate whose dogged commitment has resulted in advances around the world…
E3B PhD students Pooja Choksi, Sarika Khanwilker, and Vijay Ramesh have launched their website on Project Dhvani using bioacoustics! Check it out here: https://projectdhvani.weebly.com/
The new website includes interactive maps on where the team works, allows you to meet and contact the team working on Project Dhvani, and provides updates on their research.
The E3B department is delighted to announce that Dr. Thomas Bytnerowicz has won the 2020 Don Jay Melnick Award!
Named in honor of one of the founders of our department, the Melnick Award recognizes outstanding dissertation work and other departmental activities. Tom’s entire dissertation is incredibly elegant and rigorous. His first chapter developed a new method for measuring nitrogen fixation, which has opened new doors for an entire field, and set the stage for his second and third chapters. His second chapter overturns a decade-long assumption about the temperature response of nitrogen…
E3B Chair Shahid Naeem was quoted in The Guardian!
The article is titled: "How much is an elephant worth? Meet the ecologists doing the sums"
Congrats to members of the Rubenstein Lab on their accomplishments!
Shailee Shah won an honorable mention for her presentation at the North American Ornithological Conference. Stefanie Siller was named a 2020-2021 Teaching Assessment Fellow by the Center for Teaching and Learning. Congratulations to both on their accomplishments.
Congratulations to E3B PhD student Anika Petach Staccone who won an honorable mention for the Elizabeth Sulzman Award for her Global Biogeochemicals Cycles paper at the ESA Biogeosciences section meeting.
The ESA Biogeosciences Junior Scientist Outstanding Publication awards were initiated in 2007 to promote young scientists and highlight outstanding work in the field. The Elizabeth Sulzman Award recognizes research conducted while a graduate student, and published within two years of graduation.