IGERT Students
The first group of students were admitted in January 2010. Additional students enrolled in August 2010.
Applications are being accepted and reviewed now for August 2011 enrollment. Apply here.
 Noelle Chaine |
School of Natural Resources Education:
Research interests: Adaptive management, wildlife biology, conservation biology |
 Joana Chan |
Joana Chan Education:
Research Interests: Water in agriculture and food systems, social participation and conflict resolution in water policy, gender equity and environmental justice Proposed Research Summary: I am interested in examining the topic of agricultural water policy in stressed watersheds both locally and abroad. With increasing concerns about food insecurity internationally, I am particularly interested the role that gender and public participation may play in crafting and implementing ecologically sound and socially equitable agricultural water policy. |
 Joseph Hamm |
Joseph Hamm Education:
Research Interests: Public trust in institutions, especially stakeholder trust of regulatory institutions Proposed Research Summary: Water resource allocation is a complicated but fundamental responsibility of water regulatory institutions. Regulators must consider a number of varied and often competing concerns in order to determine the appropriate amount of water to be allocated among the various stakeholders. No matter how good the regulatory scheme is, however, it necessarily relies heavily upon the compliance of stakeholders. The current study applies two social science theories of compliance, public trust in institutions and procedural fairness, to a natural resource context in order shed light on the question of why people comply with water allocations. |
 Danielle Haak |
School of Natural Resources Education:
Research Interests: Aquatic invasive species, changes in water quality and biodiversity due to anthropogenic stressors, adaptive management, and fisheries ecology |
 Kerry Hart |
Computer Science and Engineering Education:
Research Interests: Spatial data fusion and data mining, software engineering, volunteer systems |
 Trevor Hefley |
Trevor J. Hefley Education:
Research Interests: Ecological statistics, decision making using statistics Proposed Research Summary: I am interested in testing current assumptions of ecological theory using spatial and temporally diverse data. In addition I want to apply or develop methods that will allow for said results to be timely and useful to current management of large river systems. I am also interested in applying modeling approaches to understand the utility of collecting future ecological data using historical techniques compared to data collection techniques that are adaptive as more information about the system becomes available. Trevor has set-up a site for his research. |
Christina Hoffman |
Christina Hoffman Education:
Research Interests: Water policy, transboundary water issues, water allocation planning, and adaptive management Proposal Research Summary: My research will focus on water allocation planning and how societies can develop water allocation plans that promote resiliency within watersheds in the face of a changing climate. Specifically, I am interested in how policies and laws influence water allocations in regards to both human uses and ecosystem needs, as well as how adaptive management can be applied to water allocation planning to better protect ecosystem health. |
 Kristine Nemec |
Kristine Nemec Education:
Research Interests: Restoration ecology, grassland ecology, agroecology, and ecosystem resilience Proposed Research Summary: For my doctoral research project I am studying how the diversity and initial seeding density of restored grasslands near the Platte River affects ecosystem services, including soil development, resistance to invasive plant species, and diversity of predatory invertebrates. I am interested in how the provision of these services contributes to the resilience of agro-ecosystems within the Platte River watershed. |
 Donald Pan |
Donald Pan Education:
Research Interests: Applied and environmental microbiology, microbial ecology, biogeochemistry, bioremediation, water quality, field research Proposed Research Summary: Donald Pan is a first-year PhD student in the Microbiology and Molecular Biology Program in the School of Biological Sciences under the advisement of Dr. Karrie Weber. During his undergraduate study, he developed a capacity for conceptualizing nature from the scale of bacteria all the way to the scale of planetary systems. He obtained undergraduate research experience at NASA’s Johnson Space Center researching microbiological oxygen production as part of life support systems for lunar habitats and at UC Berkeley characterizing the natural biological production of trace greenhouse gases. Don joined IGERT in January 2010 with an interest in how biological activity at the smallest scales (that of bacteria and viruses) can have ecosystem-level and global consequences. His research asks what the contribution of the viruses of bacteria (bacteriophage) is to established global biogeochemical cycles. His dissertation research will investigate the complex interactions between viruses and bacteria and how they contribute to the system-scale behavior of resilience. He will approach this from an interdisciplinary perspective, using tools from ecology, geochemistry, molecular biology, and bioinformatics. |
 Nathan Rossman |
Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Education:
Research Interests: Hydrogeology, groundwater flow modeling, groundwater-surface water interactions, water resources policy and management Proposed Research Summary: Groundwater models provide a suitable way to make an informed analysis or prediction about the consequences of a proposed adaptive management action or climate change scenario in order to maintain or increase resilience of stressed social-ecological systems. I am interested in understanding the role that groundwater flow models play in the development of water policy and the adaptive management of stressed watersheds. Additionally, my research will focus on the development of a regional finite element groundwater model of an area of the Sand Hills of Nebraska that has many freshwater and alkaline lakes where surface-water and groundwater are intimately linked, and where future groundwater use is threatening to decrease the ecological well-being of a nearly pristine environment and disrupt the social/economic security of rural Nebraskans. |
 Trisha Spanbauer |
Trisha Spanbauer Education:
Research Interests: Paleoecology, paleoclimatology, resilience, evolution Proposed Research Summary: Large lakes provide long continuous records of biological proxies and chemical data that can be used to reconstruct past climate and ecosystem state and variability. My doctoral research uses these paleo-records to test whether speciation and climate change are coupled events. Fossil diatoms (algae) and geochemical data will be used to reconstruct environmental history, and, using these data, diatom speciation events will be compared to patterns of climate change. In doing so, I am expressly interested in periods of stasis, ecological regime shifts, thresholds, and the resilience of the aquatic ecosystem. |
 Ilonka Zlatar |
School of Biological Sciences Education:
Research Interests: Ecosystem ecology, grassland ecology, biodiversity and climate change |
