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CLIMAS FELLOWS
CLIMAS Graduate & Society Fellows
The goal of CLIMAS’ Climate & Society Graduate Fellows Program is to train a group of students to cross the traditional boundaries of academic research into use-inspired science and applied research. In 2014, CLIMAS awarded four one-year fellowships to UA graduate students whose work connects climate research and decision making. The fellows each turned their $5,000 award and guidance from members of the CLIMAS research team into results-packed work.
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Sarah Truebe is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geosciences whose work focuses on helping scientists and stakeholders connect about best practices for extracting climatic information from stalagmites. Given that stalagmites provide a wealth of paleoclimate data, but are a nonrenewable resource, Truebe wants to develop sustainable methods for procuring samples from these ancient mineral deposits. She surveyed scientists and stakeholders across the globe to build a framework that will guide researchers wanting to conserve, and also learn from, these caves.
Ling-Yee Huang is a master’s degree student in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment and a researcher at the Water Resources Research Center. Her interests in both environmental science and policy led her to create the curriculum for a course that she taught at the UA’s James A. Rogers College of Law. The course, Achieving Scientific Literacy in the Classroom: A Climate Science and Law Curriculum, focused on teaching law students to think critically and scientifically about the data they encounter in climate change policy discussions.
Soil scientist Rebecca Lybrand, who earned a Ph.D. from the Department of Soil, Water and Environmental Science in 2014, sought to give an engaging voice to the soil she studies. Lybrand is interested in the effectiveness of different communication strategies when presenting science to students. To put storytelling to the test, Lybrand shot two short films about her research in the Santa Catalina Mountains. The first film follows a traditional, objective documentary approach, but the second is a first-person, personal-experience narrative. She plans to write and carry out student pre-tests and surveys to test each video’s effectiveness, then publish her findings to the science outreach community.
Chris Guiterman, a Ph.D. student working in the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, worked closely with the Navajo Forestry Department (NFD) to address the needs of the tribal nation’s forests in the face of climate change. Guiterman and the NFD shared knowledge extensively over the course of the project to quantify and assess the effects of climate change in the Chuska Mountains. As a result of the CLIMAS fellowship, Guiterman received funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Bureau of Indian Affairs to continue the project.
