Student mentoring and support 2025

Student standing in open field with field tools.

Learning and leading

With funding through a Garden Club of America Fellowship in Ecological Restoration, doctoral student Lydia Regier studies soil fungal pathogens and other factors that could enhance diversity in the restoration of species-poor prairies.

We conduct daily research activity in the lab and the field, and students are involved in virtually every grant funded. Our scientists and staff engage students through:

  • classes taught by our scientists who hold faculty positions, as well as field courses and field work led by our scientists or our graduate students;
  • opportunities for students to conduct their own research or to assist with faculty research in our labs or at the KU Field Station through fellowships or grant funding;
  • assistance to students in obtaining grants for research, developing posters and presentations for conferences, and publishing in peer-reviewed journals;
  • paid employment in our offices and at the KU Field Station.

In 2025, our researchers chaired 32 master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation committees and served as committee members for other students. They also mentored 77 undergraduate or postbaccalaureate students, most working in our labs. In addition, four students received assistance through our annual student research awards. 

Students mentored by our scientists received other honors and awards this year. Among these were the following:

  • Ashley Bowman, 2025 Ph.D. graduate, received the Ecological Society of America’s Ecological Restoration Section Early Career Publication Award for her open-access paper “Heterogeneity promotes resilience in restored prairie: Implications for the environmental heterogeneity hypothesis,” published in Ecological Applications.    
  • Lola Klamm was accepted into the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program, which provides support for graduate students to conduct doctoral research at a host DOE laboratory or facility. She spent three months at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash.  
  • Amanda Gehin, who defended her master’s thesis in December 2024, was notified in spring 2025 that it had been selected for the Outstanding Thesis Project Award by the KU College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. Her thesis title is “Tritrophic interactions with Silphium integrifolium at the axis: Mediation of silflower-insect interactions by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi.”
  • Annalise Guthrie, doctoral student, was a member of the KU RocketStars that won two awards at the 16th Annual First Nations Launch High-Powered Rocketry Competition, hosted by NASA’s Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium. RocketStars is a team of KU Indigenous science, technology, engineering and math scholars and members of the KU American Indian Science and Engineering Society chapter.

     

 

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