Lab Successes

Congratulations to our graduate students!

  • 2025-05-01: Alyssa Willson won two student awards!  Alyssa is the recipient of the Eli J. and Helen Shaheen Award in Science by the College of Science and the Exemplary Graduate Research Career which recognizes a student who best personifies the department’s mission of advancing biological knowledge by demonstrable excellence in research, educating the next generation of leaders in the life sciences, and applying their findings to solve the grand challenges that will shape the future of human health and the environment. Congratulations Alyssa!
  • 2025-04-14: Congratulations to graduate student Hannah O’Grady who received an Honorable Mention for her NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program submission. 
  • 2025-03-28: Congratulations to Alyssa Willson for the successful defense of her PhD on “The ecological time machine: Towards an understanding of vegetation-climate relationships across scales.”
  • 2024-08-26: Congratulations to Nate Kroeze for the successful defense of his Master’s work on “Environmental and Genetic Influences on Species Composition and Belowground Biomass Dynamics in Coastal Marshes.”
  • 2024-05-30: Congratulations to Megan Vahsen for winning the Ecological Society of America George Mercer Award for her “Rapid plant trait evolution can alter coastal wetland resilience to sea level rise,” publication in Science from Jan. 26, 2023.  See the full description of the award here.
  • 2023-09-11: Congratulations to Nate Kroeze who was awarded a 2023-2024 Graduate Justice Fellowship. The fellowship is designed to create an interdisciplinary community of graduate students committed to scholarship that engages questions of justice.
  • 2023-07-18: Congratulations to Megan Vahsen and co-authors for the publication “Complex eco-evolutionary responses of a foundational coastal marsh plant to global change” just out in New Phytologist. https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.19117.
  • 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!

  • 2023-05-04: Ian Shuman presented his poster on “Modeling the Historical Vegetation-Environment Relationship in the Midwestern United States” at the College of Science Joint Annual Meeting.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