Geography Ph.D. Student Receives Two Awards in One Week

April 23, 2012
Categories: College of Humanities & Earth and Social Sciences, Research
sarah_haas

sarah_haasSarah Haas, a Ph.D. student in Geography in the Center for Applied Geographic Information Science, has received a substantial travel scholarship that will allow her to study in South Africa and a National Science Foundation-funded training grant that will help her learn new data techniques.

In the first award, Haas will travel to the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa from July 1 to July 11 for the Quantitative Landscape Ecology and Environmental Sustainability workshop.

The workshop is part of a U.S.-African series focusing on biomathematical challenges arising from African and globalization issues. 

The workshop will address the application of landscape ecology to issues regarding sustainability of ecosystem services and global climate change. The workshop will also feature special training sessions in advanced mathematical modeling techniques for early career participants like Haas.

The Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science and the Mathematical Biosciences Institute are organizing the workshop.  Funding is provided by the National Science Foundation, the Society for Mathematical Biology, the University of KwaZulu-Natal and other sponsors.

Haas also has received a National Science Foundation-funded training grant.  This grant is called RCN FORECAST and is intended to more broadly disseminate methods scientists can use to address environmental challenges through data assimilation.

The grant program also seeks to identify ecological problems and research themes that can benefit from new or enhanced modeling and analysis tools.
 
This grant will fund a research exchange for her to learn new statistical and data-model assimilation techniques, working in the lab of Dr. Mevin Hooten at Colorado State University for three weeks in January 2013.

Earlier this year, Haas had won first place in the Ph.D. Student Paper Competition of the Biogeography Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers for her paper “Forest species diversity reduces disease risk in a generalist pathogen invasion.”