Student Awards

2013

Sarah Haas won first place at GPSG’s 13th Annual Graduate Research Symposium at UNC Charlotte in the category of Biology & Chemistry. The presentation title of Sarah’s NSF-funded research was “Understanding drivers of forest disease incidence and host mortality: an integrated approach across scales.”

Anya Byers won the US-IALE Travel Award. This nationally competitive $500 scholarship will allow Anya to present her research “Analyzing emerging infectious forest disease as a coupled human and natural system” at the 2013 U.S. International Association of Landscape Ecology in Austin, Texas.

2012

Whalen Dillon won the John Fraser Hart Ph.D. Paper Competition at the 2012 annual SEDAAG conference. Whalen’s written paper and presentation was entitled “Range-wide risks to a foundation tree species from disturbance interactions“. This is the fourth year in a row that UNC Charlotte has won this prestigious $1000 award in honor of excellent student scholarship at the doctoral level.

Kunwar Singh won the Ph.D. Poster Competition ($500 prize) at the 2012 annual SEDAAG conference for his research entitled “Detecting and mapping sub-canopy invasive plants in urban forests using LiDAR-derived metrics“.

Sarah Haas has been selected as the recipient of the 2012-13 Lucile and Edward Giles Dissertation-Year Fellowship at UNC Charlotte. This $21,000 award was established by Lucille Giles to allow students to focus full-time on the completion and writing of their dissertation, and to support travel associated with their research.

Meijuan Jia won a competitive NSF travel award ($1,000) to attend the international conference on Space, Time, and CyberGIS at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign and National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Kunwar Singh received a prestigious invitation to participate in the Graduate Scholars Program of NSF’s new National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) at the University of Maryland. SESYNC’s mission is to foster actionable synthesis research and education related to the structure, functioning, and sustainability of socio-environmental systems.

Monica Dorning received the Johanna R. Baker Memorial Graduate Fellowship award ($2,750). The Baker Fellowship recognizes “evidence of creative and rigorous solutions being applied to challenging public and social policy problems”. This Fellowship is among the most prestigious awards given by the Graduate School at UNC Charlotte.

Jing Deng and Wenpeng Feng won competitive awards to attend the 2012 Open Science Grid User School (June 25-28; Wisconsin-Madison) and the 2012 XSEDE Annual Conference (July 16-20 Chicago, IL).

Sarah Haas won a travel scholarship to participate in the ‘Quantitative Landscape Ecology and Environmental Sustainability‘ (QLEES) workshop at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa July 1-11, 2012.

Sarah Haas received a NSF-funded RCN FORECAST (Research Coordination Network: Forecasts Of Resource and Environmental Changes: Data Assimilation Science and Technology) training grant ($2,000).

Kunwar Singh received the Urban Forestry Fellowship from The Garden Club of America. This $4,000 national award is given to a student scientist each year in an effort to support innovative research that advances our knowledge of forest health in urban areas and to increase the number of scientists in field of urban forestry.

Sarah Haas won the 2012 Ph.D. Student Paper Competition of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Biogeography Specialty Group (BSG). Sarah presented her award winning paper entitled Forest species diversity reduces disease risk in a generalist pathogen invasion at the AAG annual meeting in NYC.

Whalen Dillon won first place in the ‘Social Sciences and Humanities’ category of the UNC Charlotte 12th Annual Graduate Research Fair 2012 for his poster entitled Multiscale analysis of disease-environment relationships in a heterogeneous landscape.

Kunwar Singh won the US-IALE Travel Award ($500) sponsored by the University of Rhode Island’s Coastal Institute to present his remote sensing research at the U.S. Annual Symposium of the International Association for Landscape Ecology in Newport, Rhode Island.

Monica Dorning won the NASA-MSU Professional Enhancement Award ($700) to present her dissertation research at the 2012 U.S. Annual Symposium of the International Association for Landscape Ecology in Newport, Rhode Island.

2011

Kunwar Singh won a $250 travel grant from the International Geographic Information Fund of the AAG to present his dissertation research at the 2012 annual AAG meeting in New York.

Monica Dorning won a $1,000 travel scholarship from the Ecological Society of America to present her paper, Simulating land change scenarios to explore urbanization-conservation conflicts at the edge of metropolis, at the ESA’s 2012 Emerging Issues Conference to be held at the National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, WV.

Sarah Haas received the Johanna R. Baker Memorial Graduate Fellowship award ($2,750). The Baker Fellowship recognizes “evidence of creative and rigorous solutions being applied to challenging public and social policy problems”.

Tomas Vaclavik won the 2011 Ph.D. Student Paper Competition of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Biogeography Specialty Group (BSG). Tomas presented his award winning paper entitled Accounting for multi-scale spatial autocorrelation improves performance of invasive species distribution modeling (iSDM) at the AAG annual meeting in Seattle, WA.

Kunwar Singh won the UNC Charlotte Graduate Life Fellow Award ($4,000). Kunwar will work with incoming graduate students and provide opportunities for students to network across disciplines.

Sarah Haas won the P.E.O. Scholar Award ($15,000) from the Philanthropic Educational Society, a long-standing organization created to promote educational opportunities for women.

Monica Dorning received a full scholarship ($4,000) for GCOE-INeT International Summer School focused on Understanding coupled natural and social systems; Feedback loops between land-use and ecosystem change. The experience will take place at Hokkaido University in Japan.

Sarah Haas won 1st place in the ‘Physical Geography & Earth Sciences Track’ of the UNC Charlotte 11th Annual Graduate Research Fair 2011 for her paper entitled Effects of biodiversity on disease risk in a generalist plant pathogen system.

Amy Stephens Davis won the NASA-MSU Professional Enhancement Award ($600) to present her dissertation research at the US International Landscape Ecology symposium in Portland, OR. This award is provided to outstanding graduate students by NASA and Michigan State University.

Tomas Vaclavik won the US-IALE sponsored student travel award ($500) to present his dissertation research at the US International Landscape Ecology symposium in Portland, OR.

2010

Kunwar Singh and Tomas Vaclavik tied for 1st place in the John Fraser Hart Ph.D. honors paper competition at the 2010 SEDAAG meeting in Birmingham, AL. This is the second year in the row that UNC Charlotte has brought home this prestigious award. Kunwar’s talk was titled Fusion of LiDAR and Landsat TM imagery for mapping land use along urban-rural gradients. Tomas’ talk was titled Accounting for multi-scale spatial autocorrelation improves performance of invasive species distribution modeling (iSDM).

Monica Dorning, Tomas Vaclavik, and Whalen Dillon received a travel scholarship ($500) from UNC Charlotte’s GPSG to present papers and posters at the 2011 annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Seattle, WA.

Sarah Haas won the USDA-NIFA Professional Enhancement Award ($500) to present her research at the US International Landscape Ecology symposium in Athens, GA. The US Department of Agriculture and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture offer this award to outstanding graduate student scholars whose research advances the field of landscape ecology, especially related to managed ecosystems and landscapes.

Kunwar Singh won the NASA-MSU Professional Enhancement Award ($700) to present his research at the US International Landscape Ecology symposium in Athens, GA. NASA and Michigan State University have teamed up to offer this award to outstanding student scholars whose research advances the field of landscape ecology, especially related to geospatial assessment of land use and land cover change issues.

Amy Stephens Davis, Monica Dorning and Kunwar Singh won a student travel scholarship ($500) to participate in the Emerging Issues Conference in Atlanta, GA. The conference will focus on environmental conditions along urban-rural interfaces. The conference seeks to bring together researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to share current research and to identify knowledge gaps regarding the interaction between urbanization, land-use change, and natural resources, with special attention on integrating socioeconomic and ecological research.

Monica Dorning won the NSF IGERT scholarship ($3,200) to participate in the 2010 Vespucci Summer Institute in Florence, Italy. The Vespucci Initiative focuses on the Advancement of Geographic Information Science and the theme in 2010 is Interfacing social and environmental modeling.

Tomas Vaclavik won 1st place in the Geography category at the 2010 GPSG 10th Annual Graduate Research Fair for his paper entitled Modeling potential vs. actual distribution of sudden oak death in Oregon: Prioritizing landscape contexts for early detection and eradication of disease outbreaks.

Sarah Haas won an NSF scholarship ($320) to present her dissertation research at the NSF-NIH Ecology of Infectious Disease meeting held in Atlantic City, NJ. Sarah’s presentation was entitled Landscape epidemiology of species diversity effects on disease risk and she is the sole representative of our interdisciplinary collaboration between UNC Charlotte, UC Berkeley, UC Davis and University of Cambridge, UK.

2009

Monica Dorning won Best Ph.D. Student Poster Award ($500) for her poster and oral presentation entitled Predicting urbanization-conservation conflicts at the edge of metropolis presented at the 2009 Southeastern Division of the Association of American Geographers (SEDAAG) annual meeting held in Knoxville, TN.

Tomas Vaclavik won John Fraser Hart Best Ph.D. Student Paper Award ($1,000) for his paper and oral presentation entitled Invasive species distribution modeling (iSDM): Are absence data and dispersal constraints needed for accurate prediction presented at the 2009 Southeastern Division of the Association of American Geographers (SEDAAG) annual meeting held in Knoxville, TN.

Sarah Haas and Tomas Vaclavik won the Integrated Hardwood Resource Management’s Scholarship to present their dissertation research at the 4th Sudden Oak Death Symposium in Santa Cruz, CA.

Tomas Vaclavik won the NASA-MSU Professional Enhancement Award ($700) to present his research at the US International Landscape Ecology symposium in Snowbird, UT. NASA and Michigan State University have teamed up to offer this award to outstanding student scholars whose research advances the field of landscape ecology, especially related to geospatial assessment of land use and land cover changed issues.