UA IGERT Program Graduate Students Receive Prestigious Awards

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — University of Alabama graduate students Dan McGarvey and Lori Tolley-Jordan, both of Tuscaloosa, were recently presented awards at the 2004 annual meeting of the North American Benthological Society (NABS) in Vancouver, British Columbia.

McGarvey and Tolley-Jordan are doctoral students in the department of biological sciences and fellows in the UA Freshwater Sciences interdisciplinary doctoral program funded by the National Science Foundation’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) program.

McGarvey received a 2004 NABS President’s Award that included a $600 check and certificate. The award was determined on the basis of an extended abstract that he wrote which included a concise description of the objectives, hypotheses, results and broader significance of his research. McGarvey gave an oral presentation at the meeting which included results from his IGERT externship and was entitled “Unsaturated Fish Assemblages in Five Oregon River Basins: Evidence of Regional Controls on Biological Diversity.”

Tolley-Jordan received a Graduate Student Conservation Research Award that included a $500 check and certificate. She submitted a research proposal that addressed one or more areas in biology/ecology of endangered/threatened species, conservation of biodiversity (genes to ecosystems) and/or restoration of an impaired species or ecosystem. The title of her proposal was “Confirmation of Morphometric Species Determinations Using Molecular Analysis of Pleuroceridae: Elimia in the Cahaba River, Alabama, USA.” It is a component of her dissertation on snail biology that will help link ecological and molecular systematic perspectives.

Both awards were supported by the NABS Endowment Fund.

McGarvey was also the recipient of an international travel scholarship funded by the NSF-IGERT program that allowed him to participate in a one-week course in July in Geographic Information Science (GIS) that was part of the 2004 Vespucci Summer School in Fiesole, Italy. The course is part of the Vespucci Initiative that brings together well-known, senior scientists and promising young researchers from around the world with special interests in locational aspects of societal challenges. McGarvey believed the experience was highly productive, saying, “The program greatly exceeded my expectations, and opened my eyes to a number of entirely new disciplinary, as well as cultural, horizons.”

IGERT is a National Science Foundation-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating doctoral-level scientists and engineers in the United States with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, and the technical, professional and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.