Fall 2014

Greetings everyone! 

It's the start of a new year in the MIT/WHOI Joint Program in Biological Oceanography.  Please welcome our two new students this year - Deepa Rao (working with Mick Follows at MIT) and Laura Weber (working with Amy Apprill at WHOI).

It's also the time when JPBO students are finishing up their dissertations to get on the MIT fall degree list.  I'm a little late with this item, but please join me and her committee (Neubert & Sosik co-advisors, Solow, Chisholm and Post) in congratulating Kristen Hunter-Cevera on her successful defense of her thesis work on August 19, 2014.  She also recently published one of her chapters in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.  Go to the link and see what great work she's done!   http://www.pnas.org/content/111/27/9852

JPBO Alum Wins Ecological Society Award

Joint Program alumna Prof. Mercedes Pascual has been awarded the Robert H. MacArthur Award by the Ecological Society of America (ESA).  One of the society's most prestigious awards, the MacArthur Award "is given biannually to an established ecologist in mid-career for meritorious contributions to ecology, in the expectation of continued outstanding ecological research. The recipient is invited to prepare an address for presentation at the annual meeting of the society and for publication in Ecology." 

Prof. Pascual is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and the Rosemary Grant Collegiate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan. As a Joint Program Student she was supervised by Hal Caswell. Her dissertation research focussed on "the interplay of scales in nonlinear ecological systems, with an emphasis on the mismatch of scales between biological variables and environmental forcings in the plankton."  Since then, Prof. Pascual has worked on a diversity of topics including the relationship between food web structure and dynamics and the effects of climate variability and climate change on the dynamics of infectious diseases such as cholera and malaria."  The ESA recognized her for devoting "enormous energy to fostering diversity of ecological researchers in the US and mentoring junior researchers worldwide," in addition to her research accomplishments.

A brief biography of Robert MacArthur, written by his colleague Edward O. Wilson and his Ph.D. supervisor, G. Evelyn Hutchinson, is worth reading.

Congratulations to Mike Neubert and Britt Raubenheimer!

I'd like to restart the WHOI Biology Education Blog with a post announcing that Britt and Mike are the recipients of the 2014 Arnold B. Arons Award for Excellence in Teaching, Advising, and Mentoring!! 

This award was established by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to honor the memory of Dr. Arnold B. Arons, long serving Trustee and Honorary Trustee of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. It is conferred periodically every two to five years to a WHOI Scientific Staff or Senior Technical Staff member who has demonstrated sustained excellence in teaching, advising/mentoring or has shown exceptional promise in these activities during early career involvement in the education programs of the Institution. 

Both Britt (a faculty member in AOPE) and Mike (a faculty member in Biology) are dedicated and effective teachers and mentors, and this was robustly demonstrated in the letters written by past and present students and colleagues for their nominations.  Please join me in congratulating both of them!