Graduate Students Honored with Research Awards

Five PhD students/candidates pursuing research at the Harvard Forest have recently received competitive awards and fellowships to support their work.

Ahmed Hassabelkreem Siddig (pictured at left) has earned a Student Dissertation Research Grant from the University of Massachusetts, to support his efforts to create a more informative measure of indicator species "effectiveness" for ecological monitoring and conservation in declining ecosystems. 

Allyson Degrassi from the University of Vermont is studying small mammal populations in hemlock forests impacted by the invasive hemlock woolly adelgid, and has won a grant-in-aid from the American Society of Mammaologists to support that work.

Rich MacLean, a student at Clark University, has earned an Edna Bailey Sussman Fund Graduate Internship for Summer Research to establish a multi-year record of warming or cooling as a result of forest clear-cutting. Both MacLean and Degrassi will be mentors in this year's Harvard Forest Summer Research Program.

Amanda Northrop (pictured with her study plants, at right) from the University of Vermont received an honorable mention for the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship Program. Her research uses carnivorous pitcher plants to predict and prevent regime shifts in aquatic ecosystems.

Meghan Blumstein, who will begin her PhD program at Harvard this fall in Andrew Richardson's lab, has been awarded a Pierce Fellowship from Harvard, as well as the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship. 

Congratulations to you all!