The Philomathia Center at UC Berkeley has awarded graudate student fellowships to six new recipients for the 2016-2017 academic calendar. The Graduate Fellowships are awarded to students based on their prior level of academic distinction and the promise that they have demonstrated in their work relating to the study of environmental science issues.
The six recipients are all PhD candidates, and are studying a wide range of topics that play a vital role in developing further comprehension of our natural environment, and the policy implications stemming from those new insights.
They are as follows:
- Gabrielle Boisrame, Civil and Environmental Engineering: Work focuses on a natural fire that has burned since 1972 in Yosemite National Park, with the hope that the work will inform future land management decisions.
- Christopher Hann-Soden, Plant and Microbial Biology: Work focuses on evolutionary biology, using genomic tools to examine fungi, as a method of understanding patterns of diversity in living things and big questions of how evolution affects our natural environment.
- Erin Jarvis, Integrative Biology: Work concerns the examination of gene patterns and how they provide a basis for evolutionary diversity over time, with the goal of providing insights to help tackle anthropogenically-induced loss of diversity, congenital defects, and the oncoming genome-editing revolution.
- Lydia Vaughn, Energy Resources Group: Work hopes to improve model representations to help predict and monitor changes to sensitive Arctic ecosystems, using soil carbon turnover rates, decompostition processes and biogeochemical controls.
- Grace C. Wu, Energy and Resources Group: Work looks at energy development and the impact that different land systems have on the transition from conventional to renewable technologies throughout the world.
- Micah Ziegler, Chemistry: Work is focused on developing energy and environmentally-relevant catalysis through inorganic chemistry, with the aim of working towards more energy-efficient and material-efficient reactions.
More information on the incoming fellowship recipients can be found at the UC Berkeley website.
The Philomathia Center at UC Berkeley was established in 2012. The fellowship program aims to bring top researchers to the school to help support and foster research that provides new breakthroughs on the environmental science issues that have a major impact on our understanding of the world.