What do a computer engineer, a molecular biologist, a psychologist, and an agroecologist have in common? They are all here at UNL – based at Hardin Hall -- as a part of a new interdisciplinary graduate education program looking at global water management issues.
The program "Resilience and Adaptive Governance in Stressed Watersheds" is sponsored by a $3.1 million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Program (IGERT). It funds doctoral students from a range of disciplines to work as a team to study watersheds from the Platte River to Eastern Europe.
UNL's IGERT graduate assistants work with many SNR faculty members and recently completed a week-long short course on Adaptive Management with wildlife population ecologist Drew Tyre. The program is coordinated by Craig Allen, wildlife ecologist and leader of the Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit. More information about the IGERT program based in SNR is online.
Over the next five years, 26 doctoral trainees will come to Nebraska from all over the world. Ten have arrived since January 2010. Here are their stories:
Sarah Becker
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I am originally from the suburbs of Chicago but have moved around a lot before coming to UNL for the IGERT program. After studying Anthropology, Biology and Philosophy at Marquette University (Milwaukee, WI), I worked in a number of field tech and environmental education jobs throughout the country (GA, NC, WA, MO). I returned to school to earn an M.S. in Zoology from Southern Illinois University (Carbondale, IL), and studied amphibian disease in Panama with Karen Lips for my thesis. After graduating in 2009, I worked in Tanzania for a not-for-profit organization conducting biodiversity and human impact assessments in the Kilombero Valley (Southwest Tanzania). I returned to the United States to pursue Ph.D. options and was happily accepted into UNL’s IGERT program. For my dissertation, I am working with Steve Thomas on nutrient and sediment budgets on the Platte Watershed and I hope to apply my findings to a tropical watershed.
Joe Hamm
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I am a third year graduate student in the university's Law-Psychology Program, social/experimental track. I came to UNL with an interest in jury decision-making and an open mind. My advisor assigned me as the graduate research assistant on a grant he was working on with the University of Nebraska Public Policy Center which was looking at misdemeanant perceptions of and compliance with the legal system. I quickly fell in love with public trust in institutions and have been part of a research team at the policy center which has worked on projects looking at the trust that students, community members and misdemeanants have in courts, local government and, most recently, water regulators. I am currently conducting research that evaluates trust in water regulators and seeks to use two trust related constructs (institutional confidence and procedural fairness) to explain compliance with water allocations.
My parents were military so it's hard to call any particular place "home" but I completed a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a minor in criminal justice at the University of Northern Colorado and I have always had family living in the area.
Christina Hoffman
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I attended Rollins College in Winter Park, FL, where I earned a B.A. in International Relations. A number of the courses I took focused on international environmental issues, where I was able to learn firsthand how connected people’s livelihoods are with the environment. After a summer of environmental volunteer work in Thailand and New Zealand, I decided to pursue a master’s degree. in environmental studies at Florida International University with a concentration in Geographic Information Systems. My thesis research at FIU was a geospatial water supply and demand analysis conducted in the Mara River Basin, an international river basin between the bordering countries of Kenya and Tanzania in Eastern Africa.
During my master's graduate work, I was able to participate in two different internships at the U.S. EPA in Washington, D.C., which eventually led to a full-time temporary position as an Environmental Scientist in the Prevention Branch, Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water. After spending time in DC, I was offered a position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Coastal Services Center West Coast Regional office where I served as a regional coastal management specialist from 2007 to 2010. My work focused on a variety of issue areas including marine spatial planning, land-use planning and water quality. One of my main roles while at NOAA was building partnerships among coastal agencies, linking partners with technical tools and trainings to build project capacity.
In the spring of 2010, I joined the School of Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska Lincoln as an IGERT student. While at UNL, I plan to pursue studies in water resource management, with a focus on water allocation planning. Specifically, I am interested in looking at how society can develop water allocation plans that will be resilient and sustainable in the face of a changing climate.
Kristine Nemec
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My research interests include restoration ecology, grassland ecology, agroecology, and ecosystem resilience. For my doctoral research project I am studying how the diversity and initial seeding density of restored grasslands affects ecological functions, including soil development, resistance to invasive plant species, diversity of predatory invertebrates, and diversity of nematodes. I am especially interested in how the provision of these functions contributes to agro-ecological resilience.
Before enrolling in the Ph.D. program at UNL, I earned a B.S. (1999) in Environmental Studies and an M.A. (2003) in Biology from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. In the past I have been an intern for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a teaching assistant for U.N.O., and a biologist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. I am currently a graduate research assistant in the School of Natural Resources.
Sergio Rico
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I obtained a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Tecnologico de Monterrey, where I developed a lot of fun and geeky electronic projects ranging from radio transmitters, USB oscilloscope/function generators to full on microprocessors. Then I was granted the Department of Defense SMART scholarship to attend Columbia University in pursuit of a graduate degree. In 2009 I obtained an M.S. in Computer Engineering while researching MAC protocols for MANETs. I then interned as a software developer for the Utah-based startup company Bungee Connect, pioneers of the Platform as a Service (PaaS) concept. While living in Utah, I discovered snowboarding and since then have seized every opportunity to speed down a snow-covered mountain.
I then moved to Boston to work as an Air Force civilian at Hanscom AFB , becoming involved in the CITS program which is the largest ground network infrastructure program in the Air Force. While in Boston I found the time to travel around New England and even do some rock and ice climbing. I took on the IGERT grant as a challenge to join the computer science advances in spatio-temporal data mining with environmental problems and I look forward to extracting useful information about the Platte River from the large amount of data available.
Joana Chan
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I began my graduate degree this January at the School of Natural Resources and am advised by Kyle Hoagland. I am interested in the human dimensions of natural resource management, particularly in concepts of resilience and equity within water policy and agroecosystems. I received my B.A. at Vassar College in Environmental Studies and Chinese, where I conducted my thesis research on tourism development in a matrilineal society in Yunnan, China. Before coming to UNL, I worked as an estuary educator on the Hudson River in New York through the Student Conservation Association and Americorps. I am originally from Brooklyn, NY.
Trevor Hefley
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Hello, I'm Trevor Hefley and I'm a Ph.D. student in the School of Natural Resources and Department of Statistics. I am originally from Lincoln, Nebraska, but can be found all over the state depending on the day. I graduated from UNL with a degree in Fisheries and Wildlife in 2010 and decided to continue my education with the newly founded IGERT program here at UNL.
As an undergrad, most of my work was as a field biologist. I have spent considerable time counting, catching, or running from a wide range of creatures including mosquitoes, deer, and feral hogs. However, as my education progressed I became more involved with other aspects of ecological research, including statistical analysis and population modeling. During my undergrad education I went from just wanting to collect data (i.e., fun stuff) to understanding how the data I collected was used.
I joined the IGERT program in August of 2010 because I wanted a holistic approach to my study of ecology. It became obvious to me that the social benefit of ecological sciences was greatly diminished because of ecologists’ lack of analytical, managerial, and political expertise. With the IGERT program I will get to learn from and collaborate with other students and faculty from backgrounds including astrophysics, physiology, law, and computer science, who are all working on a common theme—the Platte River. With such diverse collaboration, I look forward to developing my understanding of the broader aspects of ecology from designing experiments, collecting and analyzing data, and presenting it in a manner that will be more useful to policymakers.
Corrine Kolm
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I am a native Nebraskan but this is my inauguration as a full Husker. I spent my senior year of high school as an exchange student in Veracruz, Mexico, prior to matriculating at Wellesley College in Boston where I pursued a degree in biology. I was employed in entomology with the USDA prior to enrolling in graduate school. I received my master's degree in agroecology from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. In addition to studying in Norway, I spent a semester in Denmark and completed a summer program on organic agriculture in the Italian Alps. I coordinated the initial year of the Buy Fresh, Buy Local Nebraska program while completing my thesis. Until starting at UNL, I worked as an organic inspector where I had the opportunity to travel extensively across the county and to spend time in India facilitating the development of the organic food sector.
I am pursuing my Ph.D. in Natural Resources with Craig Allen. I am very enthusiastic about participating in the IGERT program at UNL, as my interests have always been interdisciplinary in nature. My research will focus on ecosystem services provided by native and restored grasslands in the Platte River watershed, including land enrolled in the USDA Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). I will explore how land use impacts populations of pollinators and how pockets of prairie (surrounded by intensive agriculture) add to the resilience of the system. In addition, I currently serve on the Mayor’s Environmental Task Force and the Nebraska Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) Advisory Committee.
Donald Pan
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I am a second-year Ph.D. student in the Microbiology and Molecular Biology Program in the School of Biological Sciences under the advisement of Dr. Karrie A. Weber. I graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with dual Bachelor’s degrees in Microbial Biology and Astrophysics. During my undergraduate study I developed a capacity for conceptualizing nature from the scale of bacteria all the way to the scale of planetary systems. My undergraduate research experience included stints at NASA's Johnson Space Center researching cyanobacterial oxygen production for lunar habitat life support systems and at UC Berkeley characterizing the natural production of trace greenhouse gases.
I joined IGERT in January 2010 with an interest in how biological activity at the smallest scales (that of bacteria and viruses) can have ecosystem-level and global consequences. My research asks what the contribution of bacteriophage is to established global biogeochemical cycles. My dissertation research will investigate the complex interactions between viruses and bacteria and how they contribute to the system-scale behavior of resilience. I will approach this from an interdisciplinary perspective, using tools from ecology, geochemistry, molecular biology, and bioinformatics.
Trisha Spanbauer
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I am part of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences here at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Broadly speaking I am interested in the processes that govern life and how life influences earth processes. My IGERT research focuses on the study of the paleoecology of aquatic ecosystems. Specifically, I will focus on the reconstruction of past environmental conditions through the study of fossil diatoms recovered from lake sediment. Diatoms are unicellular, eukaryotic algae. Freshwater diatoms are pervasive in lotic and lentic ecosystems and, because of their high species diversity and acute sensitivity to environmental variability, are useful as indicators of aquatic ecosystem change.
For my doctoral research, I intend to design a project that will utilize paleo-records to reconstruct the conditions of aquatic ecosystems through the evaluation of diatom community structure, which will reveal species richness, adaptation and radiation, as well as natural climate change. Being an IGERT trainee gives me the core course work to understand complex water issues while preparing me to work with individuals with backgrounds differing from my own. This collaboration will help to put my own research into local, regional, and global perspective while learning how to best disseminate my findings to attain positive changes in policy. These factors will be vital to my success as a professional scientist and will also benefit my development as a leader in the field of the paleoecology of aquatic ecosystems.
