Lab Successes

Congratulations to our graduate students!

  • 2023-03-31: Congratulations to Megan Vahsen for winning the 2023 Eli J. and Helen Shaheen Graduate School Award in Science at the University of Notre Dame.
    The Shaheen Award recognizes one outstanding graduate student from each of the four
    divisions of the Graduate School, and is a recognition of Megan’s research excellence in the field of biological sciences, your extraordinary publication record, and your deep commitment to service, mentorship, and teaching. The Shaheen Award signifies that Megan represents the very best in the graduating class in your division in the Graduate School.
  • 2023-02-24: Congratulation’s to Megan Vahsen for the successful defense of her PhD dissertation!
  • 2023-01-26: Megan Vahsen’s paper “Rapid plant trait evolution can alter coastal wetland resilience to sea level rise” was published in Science https://www.science.org/stoken/author-tokens/ST-985/full and highlighted by Notre Dame News
  • 2022-11-18: Congratulation’s to Helena Kleiner who successfully defended her Master’s Thesis!
  • 2022-06-24: Ann Raiho’s paper “8000-year doubling of Midwestern forest biomass driven by population- and biome-scale processes” was published in Science
  • https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abk3126
  • 2022-06-09: Alyssa Willson’s paper “Climate and hydraulic traits interact to set thresholds for liana viability” was published in Nature Communications. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-30993-2
  • 2021-11-11: Helena Kleiner received one of the Best Graduate Student Poster Awards for the 2021 Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation (CERF) Conference. You can see Helena’s poster HERE.
  • 2021-04-10: Congratulations to Haley Kodak who successfully defended her Master’s Thesis!
  • 2021-03-25: Megan Vahsen received the Kaneb Center Award for Outstanding Graduate Student TA/Instructor
  • 2021-03-23: Alyssa Willson was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Award
  • 2021-03-23: Helena Kleiner received an honorable mention for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Award.  

Congratulations to our undergraduate students!

  • 2021-04-27: Alexis Waldschmidt received the Paul F. Ware, M.D., Excellence in Undergraduate Research award, and Brianna Brown was chosen for an Outstanding Biology Student Leader award 
  • 2020-05-08: Brady Stiller received the Outstanding Biological Scientist Award and was the 2020 Valedictorian