Incentive awards for incoming PhD students offered to 5 students in the college of the environment to be used in 2024/2025

Ben Lloyd (Earth and Space Sciences) is using his fellowship to analyze fossil phytoliths (microscopic silica bodies that infill plant tissues), adding to other proxy records to gain insight into Australia’s transformation from a mostly forested landmass just 10 million years ago, to its current state, with 70% of the land area covered in arid, grassy ecosystems. These paleoecological understandings can then be used to forecast how changing environmental conditions in the future will impact modern vegetation.

John Morgan Manos (Earth and Space Sciences) uses robust fiber optic cables to sense temperature and strain within boreholes drilled in Antarctica at high spatial and temporal resolutions. Englacial ice measurements at this scale have only recently been possible and can provide new insights into small scale ice dynamics and climate. He will apply his strong background in geophysics and fiber optic techniques to both reconstruct ground surface temperature histories and better understand the ice deformation that allows ice older than 1 million years to be preserved in the Allan Hills, Antarctica. 

Jordan Winter (Oceanography) is using this fellowship to broaden her research focus to look at nitrous oxide production and utilization by an understudied and abundant bacterial phylum in the largest oxygen deficient zone in the world, the Eastern Tropical North Pacific. Jordan is expanding her work by using metagenomics to study how Marinimicrobia may contribute to the cycling of potent greenhouse gases in the nitrogen cycle.

Naomi Wharton (Oceanography) will use this fellowship to analyze temporal variability in submesoscale sea surface temperature (SST) fronts in conjunction with relevant modes of climate variability, deepening our understanding of the interactions between small-scale oceanic phenomena and longer-term variability in the Earth’s climate system. This expands upon her current work of developing an algorithm for blending SST observations from multiple satellites to produce ultra-high-resolution gridded SST estimates with quantitative uncertainties.

Claire Schollaert‘s (Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences) fellowship provided an opportunity for her to increase her analytical skills and to grow as a collaborative scientist.  Claire evaluated the air pollution impacts of unmitigated wildfire relative to the potential effects from strategic forest management practices under different treatment scenarios designed to reduce long-term risk of large, high-intensity wildfire under changing climate conditions in the Central Sierra, CA. Read more in “Can ecological forestry improve public health outcomes? The Graubard Fellowship supports a case study in the Central Sierra.”

Ben Sullender‘s (Environmental and Forest Sciences) PhD research explores the connections between snow conditions, predator-prey interactions, and climate change.  Ben describes the opportunity provided by this funding to quantifying the impact of climate change on snow and the links between these snow conditions and wildlife distribution. Read more in his blog post: “A Shifting Snowpack Links Climate Change with Wildlife Habitat Selection in the Northeast Cascades”. 

Alyssa Poletti (Atmospheric Sciences) used the PCC-Graubard Fellowship to explore the low-energy demand climate solutions. Alyssa combined a climate model called the Finite Amplitude Impulse Response model (FaIR) with an economic model that prioritizes human need over consumption. Using this new model, Alyssa explored how economic choices such as speed of renewable energy production, speed of fossil fuel phase out, and reliance on carbon capture technology impacted the temperature by 2100.

Jacob Cohen (Oceanography) used the PCC-Graubard Fellowship to use large data sets from global climate models to understand how well we forecast the area, extent, timing, and location of predicted marine heat waves (MHWs).  Read more in his blog post: “Forecasting the spatial extent of marine heatwaves”.

Climate Mitigation and Solutions

• Mudflats as a Blue Carbon Ecosystem and Climate Mitigation Tool. Assistant Professor Kendall Valentine (Oceanography)
• Increasing Carbon Storage Capacity of Agricultural Soils and Enhancing Crop Growth Through Hydrogel Encapsulated Microbes and Biochar. Professor Mari Winkler and Post-Doctoral Scholar Korena Mafune (both Civil and Environmental Engineering)
• The Science and Ethics of Marine Cloud Brightening. Professor Rob Wood, Cecilia Bitz, Tom Ackerman (all Atmospheric Sciences) and Steven Gardiner (Philosophy).
• Using Microbial Endophytes to Mitigate Heat Stress in Host Plants Amid Rising Global Temperatures. Professor Sharon L. Doty (Environmental and Forest Sciences):

Climate Impacts and Prediction

• Using Unsupervised Learning to Predict Phytoplankton Taxa Distributions in the Southern Ocean. Post-Doctoral Scholar Hannah Joy-Warren, Assistant Professor Alison Gray and undergraduate students (Oceanography)
• Impacts of Climate Change on Snow Algal Communities in the North Cascades. Post-Doctoral Scholar Brooke Weigel, Assistant Professor Jodi Young (both Oceanography), and collaborator Associate Professor Robin Kodner (WWU).

The four projects that received funding in our first round:

Mapping the REAL Road to Decarbonization with Realistic Carbon Cycle Feedbacks.  Associate Professor Abby Swann, Professor Dargan Frierson, and Assistant Professor Alex Turner (Atmospheric Sciences)

The leaders of this project are working to quantify the uncertainty in how the temperature of our planet will respond to declining carbon emissions, and to in particular explore the uncertainty in pathways to net zero stemming from our structural representation of the carbon cycle. Activities in support of that goal include a summer reading group with graduate students, postdocs, and faculty from UW who discussed a variety of reduced-complexity models, each of which represents the climate system in a unique way as well as a model intercomparison of simple climate models. Results from the group were shared at the Atmospheric Sciences Physics and Chemistry Seminar Series in Nov 2023.  In addition, this award supports the research of graduate student Greta Shum who is assessing structural uncertainty and global carbon budgets.  Greta presented at AGU Fall 2023 and at the Community Earth System Model Biogeochemistry Working Group Meeting in Feb 2024 on this work.

Building Future-Facing Partnerships on Climate Maladaptation Research and Education. Assistant Professor Sameer Shah,  (Environmental and Forest Sciences) and Assistant Professor Celina Balderas Guzman, (Landscape Architecture).

Climate maladaptation is an emerging field of research in the climate science and climate solutions community, and refers to outcomes where an adaptation activity, designed to reduce climate-related risks, in fact has an inverse effect – increasing climate vulnerability. This project supported an early-career researchers workshop in March 2023 on maladaptation at the UW, a workshop that built cross-campus collaborations on theoretical and applied climate maladaptation research. Once that was complete the project moved to phase 2, hiring of two graduate research assistants to support the development of one of the first empirical assessments of how maladaptation is driven and manifests across sectors around the world. 

“Impact of Tree Encroachment on Multi-Species Meadow Pollination Systems”, Associate Professor, Berry Brosi (Biology). The PI and graduate student Madeleine Strait are applying an experimental approach to examine how climate-induced tree encroachment into subalpine meadows affects plant-pollinator interactions. Pilot data was collected and research sites were scouted within Mount Rainier National Park last summer, providing critical information needed to apply for foundation and federal funding. They are planning to collect a full season of data this summer with the assistance of undergraduate researchers to begin determining the impact of treeline shifts on communities of flowering plants and insect pollinators.”

Polar Science at a Human Scale: Knowledge co-production and application for community climate resilience in Kivalina, Alaska. Assistant Professor Joshua Griffin (Marine and Environmental Affairs and American Indian Studies)

This project focuses on the co-production of knowledge with hunters, whalers, and search and rescue volunteers from the 500-person Iñupiaq community of Kivalina, Alaska. Kivalina is located on a barrier island in the Chukchi Sea, 80 miles above the Arctic Circle. Polar Science at a Human Scale (PSHS) is a multidisciplinary research initiative to co-produce knowledge of climate hazards—especially from sea ice loss—and support locally-identified adaptation priorities. The PCC Research Accelerator Grant provided critical support in the third year of collaboration, advancing work in several key directions, including a sea ice knowledge exchange and interviews with whaling captains on the dynamics of bowhead whaling safety and access. This accumulated data, combined with the qualitative contributions of collaborative ethnography, has catalyzed progress towards creating localized seasonal to subseasonal (S2S) sea ice forecasts for Kivalina’s coastline and created visibility through relationships with wider regional research networks.

• Jade Sauve (Oceanography) attended the 3-day biennial  Ocean Visions summit in April 2023, an event focused on trajectory-changing climate solutions and on strengthening the community developing those solutions. Jade presented on the summit to the PCC community as part of the PCC 586 Seminar, including concepts from the sessions on the ethics of climate intervention, on successful community-driven research and on breaking down barriers to the field.
• Ana Fonongava’inga Stringer (SMEA) and Chase Puentes (Geography) traveled to Kivilina, Alaska in February 2025 to continue collaboration with Colleen Swan (Administrator and Coordinator, KVL-SAR) and Reppi Swan (President, KVL-SAR; Member, Kivalina Whaling Captains Association),  Polar Science on a Human Scale co-directors, with P. Joshua Griffin (Assistant Professor of Indigenous Health and Environment, UW School of Marine and Environmental Affairs & American Indian Studies)

• An interdisciplinary team of graduate students, Ellen Koukel (Atmospheric Sciences), Charlie Hahn (Anthropology) and Chase Puentes (Geography) traveled to Kivalina, Alaska, in early December 2022 to meet with the Kivalina community to discuss capacity building around climate resilience, sea ice data collection, design funding strategies for hunter-preparedness kits, and record video interviews. The overarching project is led by Assistant Professor Joshua Griffin (Marine and Environmental Affairs and American Indian Studies) and Kivalina partners Colleen Swan and Reppi Swan (Kivalina Volunteer Search and Rescue). Read more about their adventures in their blost post “Community-Engaged Climate Adaptation: Partnering with Search and Rescue in Northwest Inupiaq, Alaska”.
• Graduate student Mary Margaret Stoll (Oceanography) collaborated with climate science communicator and rap artist, Baba Brinkman, to develop a rap about marine carbon sequestration. Baba, who recently performed at the COP27 UN Climate Conference, as well as at the UW, is a burgeoning figure on the world stage who merges science with music to build awareness about climate change with new audiences. As part of the project, Mary Margaret worked with UW School of Oceanography professors Alex Gagnon and Julian Sachs to not only create climate-science content digestible for broad public consumption, but also to examine how new forms of science communication can engage the next generation of climate scientists and activists.