Chemistry

Home » Classen

Classen

Fulbright for Rewcastle (BS 2015)

by

Kenna Rewcastle, a 2015 graduate in the College Scholars program, has been awarded a Fulbright US Student Program Grant for 2016–17. She will be going to Sweden to complete research on the impact of climate change on the food source for reindeer herds managed by the Sami indigenous people. Rewcastle, of Apison, Tennessee, who was also a Haslam Scholar as an undergraduate, spent the last year researching climate change as a laboratory and field technician with UT’s Classen Ecosystem Ecology Lab, which was helping with a project funded by the Department of Energy. She also has worked in labs in Denmark, China, Sweden, and Switzerland.

In total, four UT students were awarded Fulbright Grants this year. Read the full press release at TN Today.

Moorhead awarded NSF GROW grant

by

Leigh Moorhead, a graduate student in the Classen Lab, was recently awarded a Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide (GROW) grant from the NSF for her project: Exploring how mammal herbivore – plant community interactions shape ecosystem response to global change.

GROW grants are available to recipients of NSF GRFPs and provide students opportunities for international research.

Congratulations Leigh!

Best Paper in Theoretical Ecology

by

Jiang Jiang (NIMBioS fellow and Classen Lab postdoc) and Don DeAngelis (adjunct) have received the Ecological Society of America’s 2014 Outstanding Ecological Theory Paper Award.  Their winning paper,  “Strong species-environment feedback shapes plant community assembly along environmental gradients,” was published in the journal Ecology and Evolution in 2013 (3: 4119–4128).

“In their clearly-written paper, the authors make direct linkages to problems in plant ecology, while building a general theoretical model that addresses a key issue, not just in plant ecology, of feedbacks between organisms and their environment. Through well-designed analyses of an elegant model, they found that “ecological engineers” (species that modify the environment to their own benefit) can affect the diversity of the competitive community they inhabit, and that the direction of this effect depends critically on the extent to which the community is closed to immigration and on the spatial heterogeneity of the environment. These novel results should are likely to foster further theoretical research and generate some fine hypotheses that will motivate experimental and field studies.”

“The Theoretical Ecology Section of the Ecological Society of America sponsors an annual award for an outstanding published paper in ecological theory.  Papers with a print or electronic publication date in either of the two years preceding the year of the award are eligible.”

DOE Grant for Classen

by

Aimee Classen has received more than $880,000 from the U.S. Department of Energy to investigate often-overlooked carbon cycle players.

She and her team will examine factors that influence carbon cycling below the ground and are not included in today’s carbon-cycle models, such as bacteria and fungi.

For more information about Classen’s proposed research, read the full TN Today article.  Her research was also picked up by the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

PhD student Melissa Cregger receives DOE award

by

Melissa Cregger, a PhD student in the Aimee Classen lab, was just awarded the 2011 Marvin L. Wesely Award from the Department of Energy. The award was established in honor of the late Dr. Marvin L. Wesely, Argonne National Laboratory senior meteorologist and chief scientist of the DOE Atmospheric Chemistry Program, who died Jan. 20, 2003 from heart cancer. The Marvin L. Wesely Fellowship is awarded to the Graduate Research Environmental Fellow (GREF) who has made the best use of their DOE mentor and facilities in improving the quality of his/her research efforts. The award is given for a one-year period to a current GREF fellow who has been supported to do global change research as part of the Global Change Education Program.