Apr 25, 2018

Aquatic and Fishery Sciences’ Chelsea Wood receives 2018 Distinguished Teaching Award

Congratulations to UW Environment’s Chelsea Wood! The assistant professor at UW’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences was recently selected to receive the 2018 Distinguished Teaching Award. She will be honored at the UW’s Awards of Excellence ceremony on June 7, 2018, at 3:30 p.m. in Meany Hall. The UW community and general public are invited to attend. Distinguished Teaching Award recipients are chosen based on a variety of criteria, including mastery of the subject matter, enthusiasm and innovation in teaching and learning process, ability to engage students both within and outside the classroom, ability to inspire independent and original thinking in students and to stimulate students to do creative work, and innovations in course and curriculum design.

Two species of ravens nevermore? New research finds evidence of ‘speciation reversal’

For over a century, speciation — where one species splits into two — has been a central focus of evolutionary research. But a new study almost 20 years in the making suggests “speciation reversal” — where two distinct lineages hybridize and eventually merge into one — can also be extremely important. The paper, appearing March 2 in Nature Communications, provides some of the strongest evidence yet of the phenomenon in two lineages of common ravens.

Three UW Innovation Awards given to UW Environment faculty

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.

Aquatic and Fishery Sciences' Chelsea Wood awarded Sloan Fellowship

Chelsea Wood, an assistant professor of aquatic and fishery sciences, is among five faculty members across the University of Washington that have been awarded early-career fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Announced on Feb. 15, Sloan Fellowships are open to scholars in eight scientific and technical fields — chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences and physics — and honor those early-career researchers whose achievements mark them as the next generation of scientific leaders.

Simple rules can help fishery managers cope with ecological complexity

Schooling herring, one of the fisheries studied in this analysis.

To successfully manage fisheries, factors in the environment that affect fish — like food sources, predators and habitat — should be considered as part of a holistic management plan. That approach is gaining traction in fisheries management, but there has been no broad-scale evaluation of whether considering these ecosystem factors makes any economic sense for the commercial fishing industry. A team of ecologists and economists has addressed that question in the first study to test whether real-life ecological interactions produce economic benefits for the fishing industry.