Great Lakes Student Scientists Recognized

For IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 18, 2017

Contacts: Awards Committee Co-chairs Laura Beecraft and Lars Rudstam, [email protected]

DETROIT — The International Association for Great Lakes Research (IAGLR) recognized top student scientists for their contributions to IAGLR and Great Lakes science. The following awards were presented Thursday at the association’s 60th Annual Conference on Great Lakes Research, in Detroit, Mich.

IAGLR Scholarships
The 2017 winners are Gretchen Lescord (Laurentian University) for her research on Factors affecting biotic and abiotic mercury concentrations across a large freshwater drainage basin on the Canadian Boreal Shield and Brian O’Malley (University of Vermont) for his research on Evaluating theories about partial diel vertical migration. The IAGLR Scholarship is awarded annually to promising Ph.D. students whose dissertation research is likely to make a significant contribution to the understanding of large lakes. The award consists of a $2,000 scholarship and a one-year membership in IAGLR.

David M. Dolan Scholarship
The recipients of this year’s awards are Ashley Hendricks (Michigan Technological University) for her research on A Bayesian approach for the uncertainty analysis of a mercury biogeochemical model applied for inland Upper Peninsula lakes and Brandon Gerig (University of Notre Dame) for his research on Swimming Upstream: Ecological implications of dam removal. The scholarships, valued at $1,500 each, are awarded for the pursuit of graduate research in applied mathematics for the advancement of a quantitative understanding and management of the Great Lakes ecosystem.

Norman S. Baldwin Scholarship
The 2017 winners are Katherine O’Reilly, PhD, (University of Notre Dame) for her research on Quantifying the importance of Great Lakes coastal wetlands for supporting native fishes and Jill Brooks, MSc, (Carleton University) Drivers of the Spatial Ecology of Fish in a Coastal Embayment on the Laurentian Great Lakes. The Norman S. Baldwin Fishery Science Scholarship, valued at $3000, is awarded annually to a deserving graduate student conducting research pertaining to Great Lakes fisheries. The scholarship is sponsored by the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, IAGLR's oldest sustaining member, and honors the first executive secretary of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission.

International Travel Award
The 2017 winner is Nóra Tugyi (Hungarian Academy of Sciences; Eötvös Loránd University) for her research on Phyto- and Bacterioplankton Production in a Shallow Central European Great Lake (Lake Ferto, Hungary). This award provides travel support for a master's, Ph.D. student or a post-doctoral fellow from countries outside of the United States or Canada to attend IAGLR's annual Conference on Great Lakes Research.

JGLR/Elsevier Student Author Award
This year’s recipient is Daniel Titze, University of Minnesota-Duluth, for his article Novel, direct observations of ice on Lake Superior during the high ice coverage of winter 2013–2014, Journal of Great Lakes Research 42: 492-501. This award, valued at $750, recognizes a student scientist who is first author on a top-ranked article in the Journal of Great Lakes Research. The article was coauthored with Jay Austin.

IAGLR Awards
These awards recognize the best student papers and posters presented at the previous year’s conference. The following winners presented at IAGLR’s 2016 conference at the University of Guelph, in Guelph, Ont.

The winners of the 2016 IAGLR Best Student Paper Award­­ are Lisa Peterson (Michigan State University) for her presentation on Evaluating Methods for Estimating Mortality of Great Lakes Walleye using Acoustic Telemetry and Paul Bzonek (University of Toronto) for his presentation on Common Carp movement in response to acoustic and strobe-light barriers in a mesocosm.

Winners of the 2016 IAGLR Best Student Poster Award are Nicholas Jordan (University of Wisconsin-Madison) for his poster titled Coastal Bluff Evolution Adjacent to Shoreline Protection Structures in Lake Michigan and Céleste Irambona (École Polytechnique de Montreal) for her poster on Moisture recycling over the Laurentian Great Lakes as simulated by the CRCM5.