College of the Environment faculty received all three of the University of Washington’s Innovation Awards for 2018. The awards are designed to stimulate innovation among faculty from a range of disciplines and to reward some of their most novel ideas, and are made possible by generous donors.

Knut Christianson and Michelle Koutnik from the Earth and Space Sciences, along with David Shean from Civil and Environmental Engineering, were awarded $300,000 over two years to “build a digital glacier time machine” that will generate a high-resolution, 3-D time series of how glaciers have changed over time to help understand the future of water resources in the western United States.

Jodi Young from Oceanography was awarded nearly $270,000 to understand how sea-ice algae and sea-ice influence each other. She will build an artificial, laboratory-scale, sea-ice system that mimics the seasonal formation and melt of Arctic sea ice that will provide an experimental system capable of testing future Arctic scenarios.

Chelsea Wood and Luke Tornabene from Aquatic and Fishery Sciences were awarded nearly $300,000 over two years to collect baseline data on parasites in preserved fish in Puget Sound from as far back as 1880. This data from the past will help ecologists and others anticipate future disease threats in marine ecosystems.