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PhD Grad Earns International Award
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JANUARY 17, 2005 -- Michigan Tech PhD graduate Eugenie Euskirchen will receive an Outstanding Doctoral Research Award from the International Union of Forest Research Organizations.
IUFRO makes this award once every five years and Euskirchen is one of seven recipients, to be honored in August. She earned a PhD in Forest Science from Michigan Tech in 2003.
She is being honored for her work on the role of forests in carbon cycling. "There's tremendous interest in understanding the fate of atmospheric carbon because we are polluting the atmosphere with carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels," said Professor Kurt Pregitzer, who was Euskirchen's co-advisor, along with former MTU faculty member Jiquan Chen. "Forests are strong sinks for carbon, and Eugénie worked on the role of forests in sequestering atmospheric carbon."
In her thesis, she investigated how the age of forests determines the amount of carbon they withdraw from the atmosphere. "Middle-aged forests store carbon at a faster rate than older forests, while forests that have recently been disturbed, as by logging or wildfire, can actually lose carbon to the atmosphere," Pregitzer explained.
Pregitzer and Euskirchen coauthored a paper based on her doctoral research, "Carbon Cycling and Storage in World Forests: Biome Patterns Related to Forest Age." It was published last year in Global Change Biology.
Pregitzer and Dave Reed, MTU's vice president for research, nominated Euskirchen for the IUFRO award. It will be presented in August at the organization's annual World Conference, in Brisbane, Australia. She will receive a medallion, a scroll and $1,500.
Now a postdoctoral scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Euskirchen is modeling the effects of soil temperature changes on the length of the growing season, productivity, and carbon sequestration in the Arctic.
She came to MTU's forest science program via an unusual route, having earned a bachelor's degree in math with minors in French and natural sciences from Marymount College, in Tarrytown, N.Y., and a master's in mathematical sciences from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Before enrolling at Michigan Tech, Euskirchen had lived in Denmark, studied in Paris, and visited Italy, the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria, Holland, Belgium, Hungary, England, Ireland, Costa Rica and Chile.
"When she came here, she'd been many places on this green earth and was sick of the city," Pregitzer recalls. "She rode her bike all over the Copper Country--she used to take off and ride to Bessemer or the Porkies."
An endurance athlete, she participated in the UP triathlon series from 1998 to 2003, which includes the Copperman triathlon in Copper Harbor, not typical endeavors for time-strapped grad students. But what impressed her advisor the
most was her research.
"Eugénie's work was world-class," Pregitzer said. "And now we expect her to be a world-class ambassador for Michigan Tech." |
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