Citation

Nick Ward’s accomplishments related to understanding the biogeochemical cycling of carbon fully align with the spirit of the Thomas Hilker Early Career Award for Excellence in Biogeosciences and training not only for their importance to the biogeosciences community, but also for their relevance to society given the need to better understand the coastal ocean’s role in the global carbon cycle. Nick’s work appears in high-quality journals that span the fields of hydrology, ecology, and biogeochemistry. He has creatively broadened and deepened the biogeochemical research community’s understanding of carbon cycling processes in ways that surpass the most accomplished early-career scientists. His 2016 Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences and 2019 Limnology and Oceanography Letters publications demonstrated the importance of priming effects as a mechanism for decomposition of organic matter that would otherwise be considered recalcitrant in inland and coastal waters. Nick led another already highly cited 2020 Nature Communications review article titled “Representing the function and sensitivity of coastal interfaces in Earth system models,” which draws on literature from across coastal terrestrial, wetland, and aquatic domains to propose a road map for addressing knowledge gaps in coastal science to advance Earth system models. Nick has excelled in mentoring young researchers. Although working at a national laboratory, he has proactively sought opportunities to mentor more than a dozen undergraduate and graduate students from diverse backgrounds. Although he has an extremely broad and deep understanding of carbon cycling, he is not intimidating to the earlier-career researchers. Rather, they are inspired and encouraged by him to embrace the beauty of discovery and learning provided by research. His contributions as a servant to the science community are already distinguished.

Besides his unwavering commitment to the advancement of peer-reviewed research by reviewing for more than 30 different journals, he also serves as an associate editor for four journals.

Nick’s leadership skills of listening and building consensus were critical for the development of EXCHANGE, a community driven collaborative science project focused on developing a new understanding of coastal ecosystem function. We are fortunate to have such an accomplished and talented rising star within the biogeochemical sciences community.

—Kenneth M. Kemner, Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, Ill.

Response

It is an amazing honor to receive the Thomas Hilker Award. I am humbled to be recognized alongside the groundbreaking scientists who have previously received this recognition as well as Dr. Hilker, whose legacy as a leader in understanding the global carbon cycle continues to have a lasting influence on the biogeosciences community. My journey navigating a career in science has had many twists and turns and exposed me to more lifelong friends, mentors, and cultures than I can count. One thing has remained consistent throughout this journey: the support and sense of community that societies like AGU foster. Attending AGU Fall Meetings has been a ritual since graduate school that consistently reinvigorates my scientific drive; seeing the insights and interdisciplinary connections that emerge when a highly diverse global geoscience community convenes is truly inspiring, and I am proud to be a part of this bustling community.

A community-wide collaborative spirit is central to solving Earth’s largest challenges in the Anthropocene. Likewise, supporting and mentoring the next generation of scientists drive scientific innovation that builds on the foundation of past discoveries. The impact that I have personally made on how we understand the Earth system is a product of countless strong role models, mentors, mentees, peers, and inspirational geoscientists. Working in various marine chemistry labs as an undergraduate with Lihini Aluwihare, Dan Repeta, and others inspired me to pursue a career in science. My graduate advisers Jeff Richey and Rick Keil and postdoc adviser Tom Bianchi each emphasized in different ways the importance of understanding the history of biogeochemistry as motivation for novel studies that further advance the field. As a research scientist, I have been lucky to have mentorship from experts from many different fields and the opportunity to mentor young scientists with diverse backgrounds, which have fueled my insatiable desire to understand how carbon is cycled across the interface of different Earth systems. My nominator for this award, Ken Kemner, has been an incredible mentor along with my other letter writers, Pat Megonigal, Liz Canuel, and Tom Bianchi. There are too many fantastic people to name associated with the highly interdisciplinary project that I hold near to my heart—COMPASS Field, Measurements, and Experiments. The entire team is amazing, and the principal investigator, Vanessa Bailey, has been a major advocate and mentor. Of course, what matters most in life is family—thank you for your support, hugs, and kisses, Francis, Margot, and Katie!

—Nicholas D. Ward, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Sequim, Wash.

Citation

I am extremely happy to announce that Asst. Prof. Dr. Laura Meredith is the recipient of the 2022 Thomas Hilker Award for her exceptional work connecting the atmospheric science and molecular biology communities to elucidate fundamental questions on ecosystem function using an exciting and creative fusion of high-resolution atmospheric trace gas measurement techniques with metagenomic and metatranscriptomic measurement and modeling. I first met Dr. Meredith in San Francisco at AGU’s Fall Meeting 2015, where she was discussing results from her prestigious National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship to investigate the links between CO18O and COS gas exchange from a range of soils and biomes at Stanford University. During this fellowship, Dr. Meredith brought together a range of biogeochemical approaches and collaborators to estimate the abundance and diversity of a family of enzymes, the carbonic anhydrases, between different soils and biomes for the first time and how they related to soil-atmosphere gas exchange. Since then, Dr. Meredith has moved on to establish her own research group (https://www.laurameredith.com/) at the University of Arizona where she continues to develop her expertise in sophisticated state-of-the-art gas exchange measurements of trace gases and microbial genomics to develop novel insights into biogeochemical cycles and ecosystem function. In particular, Dr. Meredith stepped into a leadership position within the community by becoming director of the Biosphere 2 Tropical Rain Forest facility. In this role, Dr. Meredith impressively coordinated a large-scale rain forest manipulation experiment at Biosphere 2 with over 90 participants from 14 institutions and five countries to investigate the role of drought on the exchange of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) and trace gases from tropical plants and their rhizosphere communities. Throughout the 5-month campaign, she demonstrated her impressive leadership capacity, which is outstanding for an earlier career scientist. This unique whole-ecosystem 13CO2 and deep-water labeling experiment comprehensively addressed fundamental small-scale processes all the way up to integrated ecosystem fluxes, linking metabolism to ecosystem function. For all these reasons, all her letter writers agree that Dr. Meredith is an outstanding early-career scientist who has made significant contributions to the field of biogeosciences that are worthy of recognition by the AGU Thomas Hilker Early Career Award. —Lisa Wingate, French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE), Paris

Response

I am honored to receive the Thomas Hilker Award. It is humbling to become one of the esteemed recipients of this award, which memorializes the contributions of Thomas Hilker to diverse research topics in the biogeosciences. Biogeosciences is not where I started, but it is where I have found my home. As a graduate student of atmospheric chemistry, I was astounded by the sensitivity of the global atmosphere to the terrestrial microbiome. Excitingly, many questions persist on the role of soil microbes in biosphere-atmosphere exchange, and rapid advances in genomics and trace gas detection open new opportunities for integration. It has been my goal to build understanding and tools at this interdisciplinary frontier by connecting the atmospheric science and molecular biology communities. I am deeply grateful to mentors for their guidance along my academic journey, including Paula Welander, Tanja Bosak, and Colleen Hansel, who supported my first steps in microbiology, and my nominators, Lisa Wingate, Steve Wofsy, Scott Saleska, Christiane Werner, and Brendan Bohannan, who model excellence in the biogeosciences. To my collaborators who are as eager to teach through research as they are to learn, I thank you for creating space to grow and take new directions. I would like to thank Christiane Werner and S. Nemiah Ladd, my coleads of the Biosphere 2 Water, Atmosphere and Life Dynamics rain forest drought campaign, and the entire campaign team for their skill, tenacity, and positivity. I am grateful to the University of Arizona and Biosphere 2 for institutional support. Finally, I thank the talented members of my group for their research and mentoring contributions. I am particularly grateful for undergraduate and high school researchers whose trust, curiosity, and enthusiasm never fail to revitalize my zeal for the research process. I am proud to be a part of the field of biogeosciences for its embrace of diverse approaches to answering critical questions for our global future, and I am deeply grateful for your support and for honoring me with the Thomas Hilker Award. —Laura Meredith, School of Natural Resources and the Environment, University of Arizona, Tucson

Kimberly Novick received the 2019 Thomas Hilker Early Career Award for Excellence in Biogeosciences at AGU’s Fall Meeting 2019, held 9–13 December in San Francisco, Calif. The award recognizes “a scientist whose research propels any discipline related to the field of biogeosciences.”

 

Citation

I am thrilled to announce Assoc. Prof. Kimberly Novick as the recipient of the 2019 Thomas Hilker Award, for her cross-disciplinary work that elucidates key physiological mechanisms that govern ecosystem interactions with a changing climate and for her leadership service to environmental observation networks for the study of land–atmosphere feedbacks at policy- and management-relevant scales.

I have known Kim since 2001, when she conducted and published an undergraduate thesis exploring how the carbon balance of grassland ecosystems responds to periodic drought and harvest. With her Ph.D., she extended her work to forests, considering how canopy architecture provides hydraulic constraints on leaf gas exchange, and then used this knowledge to improve our understanding of how plant defense is altered with elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide. At Indiana University, she focuses on land–atmosphere interactions in the eastern United States, where the combined effects of co-occurring changes in land cover and climate have been occurring for centuries now. Using long-term AmeriFlux records, Kim and her collaborators have demonstrated a persistently high carbon sink in maturing eastern U.S. hardwood forests, in contrast to expectations from ecological theory. However, by recognizing that plants operate along a continuum of water-saving (isohydric) to carbon-maximizing (anisohydric) responses to water stress, her work shows that the decline of anisohydric oaks in the eastern United States will make these forests more sensitive to water limitation in the future. Likewise, her lab’s influential work to disentangle plant physiological response to declining soil moisture and rising vapor pressure deficit during drought has clear implications for drought tolerance of future ecosystems in a climate that will be characterized by higher vapor pressure deficit.

For these reasons, all her letter writers agree that Kim should receive the Hilker Award—for bridging biogeosciences, ecophysiology, and climate science and transforming them into a field that addresses pressing societal problems.

—Gaby Katul, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, Durham, N.C.; and Paul Stoy, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Response

I am honored to receive the inaugural Thomas Hilker Award. Recollections shared by Thomas’s colleagues make clear his lasting impact on the biogeosciences, driven by the force of his ideas and his personality. I am grateful for this opportunity to carry his legacy forward.

My work owes a great debt to the AmeriFlux network—a willing “coalition” of scientists that has crafted a culture of open data sharing and collaboration that provides many intellectual and social benefits for early-career scientists. I am also grateful for the many professional benefits I receive as co-organizer for Flux Course, an annual 2-week early-career workshop driven for more than a decade by the vision of Dave Moore and Russ Monson. My postdoctoral work at Coweeta Hydrologic Lab, supervised graciously by Chelcy Miniat, connected me with communities of ecologists and land managers who sharpen my lab’s focus on practical problem solving. I am also grateful for the institutional support I’ve received from Indiana University and the many smart collaborators, postdocs, students, and technicians I’ve had the honor to work with there. I am particularly indebted to Rich Phillips, who, whether he knows it or not, has been my mentor for many years.

My graduate school experience had a deep impact on my career. I continue to collaborate often with former lab mates like Paul Stoy, who taught me at least half of what I know. And I am certain I had the world’s kindest and wisest Ph.D. advisor, Gaby Katul, who among other things taught me the crucial role of approaching research questions with a strong theoretical foundation. Finally, and above all, I thank my husband, Mike Jackson, for many years of love and support for striking the right balance between work and all the rest of life.

—Kimberly Novick, O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University, Bloomington