SAGE Awards Archive

Tyler Lark was selected as the 2012-2013 Roy F. Weston Graduate Fellow in Sustainability Studies. This 9-month academic fellowship is the top award at SAGE, and is only given to our most outstanding students. The award was named in honor of UW alumnus Roy Weston, who was a visionary leader in sustainability in the business world, and his gift supports future leaders in the science, engineering and technical foundations of sustainability. Tyler's outstanding scholarship, leadership, and dedication to issues of environmental sustainability motivated his selection by the SAGE Investigator's Council for this prestigious award.  (April 2012) 


Erica Bickford has been awarded The Reid Bryson Scholarship for top graduate student research project for 2012. This award honors the life and legacy of Center for Climatic Research founder and late UW-Madison professor Reid Bryson. The scholarship aims to reward exemplary students whose research mirrors the innovative and interdisciplinary studies of Reid Bryson, involving either fundamental climate and meteorological processes or topics that connect climate, people, and the environment. (April 2012)



Vijay Limaye was awarded a Scott Kloeck-Jenson Fellowship from Global Studies at UW-Madison to conduct research on energy demand, air quality and health at The Energy and Resources Institute in Delhi, India (April 2012).




SAGE undergraduate Keith Maki was awarded a Class of 2012 NOAA Ernest F. Hollings Undergraduate Scholarship. As part of this award, Keith will receive an annual $8,000 stipend for two years and a prestigious summer internship at a NOAA research lab.
(April 2012)

Erica Bickford and Phillip Duran received travel awards to present talks at the June 2012 international conference of Global Emissions Inventory Activity (GEIA) in Toulouse, France (March 2012).



Olivia Clifton won $2500 as a 2012-2013 Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium Undergraduate Research Award, which she will use to pursue a research project on "Analysis of Satellite Data of Electrical Emissions of NO2." (March 2012)

Vijay Limaye has been accepted for IIASA's Young Scientists Summer Program and will be working with the Mitigation of Air Pollution and Greenhouse Gases program to model the electricity sector/air quality/health in India using GAINS-Asia and data from The Energy and Resources Institute, a collaborator in Delhi. (March 2012)

Erica Bickford has been named one of two 2012-2013 AGU Congressional Science Fellow, and will be moving to Washington DC in September, following the completion of her Ph.D. in the Nelson Institute Environment & Resources Program. As part of the fellowship, Erica will be serving in Congress and assisting with science policy issues, and she will be an important "face" of the 50,000+ American Geophysical Union, writing periodic columns for the AGU's weekly newspaper, EOS.  (March 2012) 


Undergraduate researcher Olivia Clifton will participate in the summer NASA Student Airborne Research Program in Earth System Science. Olivia will work to collect and analyze airborne data on NASA's P-3B aircraft. Olivia is a senior in Applied Math-Ecology, working with Prof. Holloway's air quality research group.  (March 2012) 




Maggie Grabow, SAGE PhD candidate, gives presentation of her research on the co-benefits of "bikeability" at the Trek World Headquarters, Waterloo, WI (2/15/12). read article





Congratulations to Dr. Rachel Licker, SAGE's newest PhD!
"Assessing Global and Regional Crop Yield Patterns: An Integration of Biophysical and Social Drivers" (Dec 14, 2011)




Erica Bickford's research featured in UW-News, "For Midwesterners, more boxcars mean cleaner air"...






Maggie Grabow, SAGE PhD candidate and lead author of "Air quality and health benefits from reduced car travel in the Midwestern United States", presented the study to the American Public Health Association in Washington, D.C. The article was published in Environmental Health Perspectives (Nov 2011) (Article)
Press Coverage: UW News, Huffingtonpost, The Atlantic



Congratulations to Matt Luedke on his Masters Thesis defense (August 2011) (August 2011)

Congratulations to Melissa Motew on her Masters Thesis defense, "Climate induced Changes in Natural Ecosystems of the Midwest, U.S." (August 2011)

Congratulations to Jacob Oberman for placing 1st among student posters in the NOAA Hollings Workshop, August 2011.

Congratulations to Marc Mayes on his Masters thesis defense, "Land use and soil effects on soil organic carbon and nitrogen in the Konya Basin, TR: methods and data for landscape-scale environmental monitoring" (July 2011)

Congratulations to Mark Liu on his Masters thesis defense, "Multi-resolution Remote Sensing Approach to Crop Type Mapping". Advisor Mutlu Ozdogan.
Friday (May 2011)

Congratulations to Jami Morton and Keith Cronin! Both SAGE students in the Nelson Institute
Environment & Resources program recently defended their M.S. research. May 2011.

SAGE Students in Snowshoe, $15K winners of the 2010 Climate Leadership Challenge, prominently featured in the UW Entrepreneur of the Year Celebration and featured in Scientific American!

Rachel Licker wins the Center for Climatic Research's 2011 Reid Bryson Scholarship and its $1500 prize for her poster "Integrating Climatic and Social Factors in Assessing Crop Yield Gaps: A Case Study Comparing the Breadbaskets of France and Russia". Chris Kucharik is Rachel's PhD advisor. (April 2011)

Carol Barford Advisee, Ashwini Bharatkumar (UW undergrad) won a Holstrom Environmental Scholarship for her proposal "Evaluating the Role of Risk in Wisconsin Biomass Infrastructure Development"
Ashwini will be a senior next year in Information Systems  and Operations and Technology Management
(April 2011)

Vijay Limaye was awarded a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship for the 2011-12 academic year by UW-Madison's Center for South Asia to continue his study of Hindi in preparation for research in India.
(March 2011)

Vijay Limaye was selected for an internship at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Delhi, India under the Research Internships in Science and Engineering (RISE) program of the Indo-US Science & Technology Forum. (Feb 2011)

Rachel Licker was awarded a $1500 Vilas Research Travel Grant (Dec 2010)

Congratulations to our newest PhD – Dr. David Zaks! David defended his PhD dissertation "Reducing Negative Environmental Externalities from Agricultural Production: Methods, Models and Policies" on Friday 12/3/10. David's advisor was Dr. Chris Kucharik.

Congratulations to Environment & Resources M.S. recipient Steve Plachinski! Steve defended his thesis "The Effects of Climate and Electricity Emissions on Air Quality in the United States" Nov 22, 2010.  

Erica Bickford was named Student of the Year (SOY) in the National Center for Freight Infrastructure, Research, and Education (CFIRE), here at UW! This is a huge honor. As the CFIRE Student of the Year, she will receive $1,000 plus the full costs to attend the 2011 Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting and a certificate from USDOT. The 20th Annual Outstanding Student of the Year Awards ceremony is scheduled to take place as part of the Council of University Transportation Centers annual banquet, where Erica will be recognized, along with other student-of-the-years from other University Transportation Centers. Erica is a student in the Nelson Institute E&R program, with certificates in Air Resources Management (ARM) and Transportation Management and Policy (TMP), working with Tracey Holloway's group at SAGE. Her Ph.D. work has been funded by CFIRE, and she serves as the TMP student representative. Visit Erica's webpage.

Yang Yang awarded $225 Nelson Institute Student Travel Grant to present at the Global Land Project Open Science Meeting in Arizona (Oct 2010)




Congratulations to Dr. Jill Baumgartner! Jill's PhD thesis is entitled "The Effects of Biomass Smoke Exposure on Blood Pressure Among Adult Women and Children in the United States and China" (10/30/10)

Chaoyi Chang awarded 2011 IGERT Associate grant to study patterns of urban change in Yunnan, China. The study is supported by the Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainable Development in Southwest China Program at the UW-Madison (Oct 2010)

Erica Bickford has been selected as one of a handful to students to be awarded a complimentary registration to attend the Rail~Volution Transportation Conference in Portland, Oregon this October. Registration is courtesy of the Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium (OTREC) and travel costs are supported by UW-Madison's Center for Freight and Infrastructure Research and Education (CFIRE).

Steve Plachinski and Aleia McCord awarded CHANGE-IGERT $6000 travel grant for research team to participate in a Wisconsin biogas delegation trip to Germany in September 2010. This delegation will examine Germany’s rapid growth in biogas and renewable energy and determine if German strategies and policies are viable options for Wisconsin.

Diana Husmann defended her master's thesis in September 2010
- Diana won a Graduate Fellowship from the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium for the 2009-10 academic year.
- She spent last summer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
- Her thesis is a study identifying the origins of the most important breakthroughs in solar photovoltaics over the past 50 years.

Congratulations to Kelly Logan on Passing her Master's Thesis Defense
August 16, 2010
"Impacts of urbanization on energy balance, net primary productivity, and surface runoff in the U.S. Corn Belt: An ecosystem modeling approach across three metropolitan regions"
Nelson Institute Environment and Resources Program

Congratulations to Dr. Bill Sacks! Bill's thesis is entitled "Improving the representation of agricultural management in land surface models" (7/16/10). Bill will be starting a postdoctoral fellowship jointly sponsored by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) in Boulder, CO in Sept 2010.

Congratulations to Chris Uejio on winning a Dissertation Fellowship Award, jointly sponsored by NSF, Swiss Re, The Public Entity Risk Institute, and the University of Colorado Natural Hazards Center. (July 2010) 






Congratulations to Steve Plachinski (and co-authors Gary Radloff, Mirna Santana, Jeff Starke, Rob Beattie, and Jonathan Patz). Steve’s poster, “Got Gas? Dairy Farm Manure Digestion as a Sustainable Development Strategy in Wisconsin“, was one of 10 Poster Challenge winners at the annual IGERT Principal Investigators Meeting May 23-25, 2010.

Jami Morton and Vijay Limaye have been selected as all expense paid participants in the Advanced Study Program (ASP) summer colloquium, “Asia in the 21st Century” at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO in August 2010. (April 2010)

Jacob Oberman was awarded the prestigious 2010 NOAA Ernest F. Hollings Scholarship, which provides two years of support at $8,000 per year for full-time study during the 9-month academic year and a 10-week, full-time internship position during the summer at a NOAA facility. Jacob was also awarded the 2010 UW-Madison Holstrom Environmental Scholarship, which provides $4000 of support for Jacob to work with Prof. Holloway on an independent research project assessing the impact of climate change on ground level particulate matter (the Holstrom award also provides $1,000 for costs associated with the research, which will be spent supporting Jacob to attend the 2010 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, CA). Jacob is a sophomore in Chemical Engineering who has been working at SAGE since early 2009. (April 2010)

Aleia McCord has been selected to receive a 2010 National Research Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF) for her work on microbial ecology in western Uganda.  With advisors, Jonathan Patz and Tony Goldberg, Aleia studies how land use change impacts zoonotic disease emergence and distribution. 




Vijay Limaye received honorable mention for his proposal to the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship Program. Vijay works with Profs. Patz, Ozdogan and Schneider to investigate how land cover change affects public health problems in cities (road traffic injuries in India) and agricultural sectors (malaria in Turkey).

Erica Bickford has been selected as an all expense paid participant in the 2010 AMS Summer Policy Colloquium, June 6-15, 2010, in Washington, DC (March 2010)

Claus Moberg Wins the Roy F. Weston Graduate Fellowship in Sustainability Studies. This 9-month academic fellowship is the top award at SAGE, and is only given to our most outstanding students. The award was named in honor of UW alumnus Roy Weston, who was a visionary leader in sustainability in the business world, and his gift supports future leaders in the science, engineering and technical foundations of sustainability. Claus' outstanding scholarship, leadership, and dedication to issues of environmental sustainability motivated his selection by the SAGE Investigator's Council for this prestigious award. 


Claus Moberg has received an award from MeteoSwiss to attend the June 8-10, 2010 Symposium on Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics at Mountain Sites of Interlaken, Switzerland

Erica Bickford has received a Fellowship to participate in the 18th annual Eno Leadership Development Conference in Washington, DC, May 17-20, 2010. This prestigious Leadership Development Conference provides participants with a first-hand look at how transportation policy is developed and implemented. Participants meet with top government officials, leaders of associations, and members of Congress and their staff and see how the nation's transportation policies are debated, shaped, formed, and ultimately adopted and applied. (March 2010)

Erica Bickford won the Helene M. Overly Memorial Scholarship from the Women's Transportation Seminar, recognizing an outstanding female graduate student working on transportation research. (Jan 2010)

Following the completion of her NASA-funded post-doc at SAGE, Dr. Meiyun Lin will be starting at Princeton University in June 2010 as a postdoctoral scientist, with promotion to Associate Researcher in September 2010. Meiyun will be working at the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), investigating multi-scale interactions between climate change and air quality with state-of-the-art global and regional models.

David Zaks has been accepted in to the Santa Fe Institute Global Sustainability Summer School in Santa Fe, New Mexico from July 12 through July 25, 2009.

Erica Bickford has been selected to participate in the prestigious Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP) at IIASA (International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis) this year. IIASA is located outside of Vienna, Austria, and the YSSP is a highly competitive 3-month internship program with students working on interdisciplinary environmental research. Erica will be joining the Air Pollution and Economic Development project, closely connected to her Ph.D. research on transportation and air pollution. (4/09)

Claus Moberg won a $6000 Graduate Fellowship Award through the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium for his proposal to use NASA satellite data of air pollution to understand how atmospheric processes in mountainous regions affect air quality. (4/09)

Paul West was awarded the Laurel Clark Graduate Fellowship. The Dr. Laurel Salton Clark Memorial Graduate Fellowship Award was established by the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium in 2004 in honor of Dr. Laurel Clark, Columbia Space Shuttle astronaut and resident of Wisconsin. The award is granted annually to a promising Wisconsin graduate student attending a Wisconsin Space Grant institution, who is pursuing studies in the fields of environmental or life sciences, and whose research has an aerospace component. Additionally, the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium seeks to support those students who personify the qualities of leadership, intellectual balance, and an ongoing commitment to improving the human condition that were the hallmarks of Dr. Clark's life. (3/09)

Prof. Jonathan Patz awarded an H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship. This award recognizes Jonathan's exceptional contributions to the University of Wisconsin and beyond to the worldwide scientific community, of which he is so well regarded. This program, funded by WARF in recognition of the leadership of the late WARF Trustee President, H.I. Romnes, is intended to recognize and support faculty for the quality, significance, and productivity of the nominee's research, as well as the quality and programmatic value of the nominee's teaching and service. (Spring 2009)

MS Student Anne Shudy Palmer won a scholarship to attend the "Conservation Capital in the Americas Conference" January 2009 in Valdivia, Chile.

PhD Student Sarah Olson received a full award to travel and attend the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in New Orleans this winter to present her cutting-edge work on malaria in the Amazon.

PhD Student Maggie Grabow was awarded a full scholarship to attend the International EcoHealth Forum 2008, Dec 2008.

CHANGE Fellow Micah Hahn was awarded a full scholarship to attend the International EcoHealth Forum 2008, Dec 2008. 

SAGE post-doc Meiyun Lin awarded competitive support to attend the upcoming "Preparing for a Faculty Career" Workshop at the University of Oklahoma and to attend the International Global Atmospheric Chemistry (IGAC) meeting in France.

SAGE PhD student Sarah Olson wins Best Student Paper Award at the International Association of Landscape Ecology meeting in Madison, WI.

Jill Baumgartner, PhD student, receives UW Graduate Student Mentor Award through the Graduate School Collaborative and the Multicultural Graduate Network. This award recognizes Jill as someone who has demonstrated outstanding mentorship qualities while in graduate school.

Caitlin Littlefield wins a Nelson Institute sponsored scholarship to attend a series of innovative Journal of Facilitation and Collaboration workshops.

David Zaks, SAGE PhD student, wins Laurel Clark Memorial Graduate Fellowship. This fellowship is named in honor of astronaut Dr. Laurel Clark, a Wisconsin native, who perished in the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster.The fellowship recognizes exceptional graduate students from Wisconsin in the field of environmental or life sciences, who show strong leadership qualities, intellectual balance and commitment to improving the human condition.

SAGE student worker Isabella Lau wins an Isthmus Green Day Challenge. They proposed an environmental community center ("Earth Center") that would be a place to re-establish our relationship to the earth and to each other through the discovery of common ground, the empowerment of individuals, and the sharing of stories. Jon Foley is a featured speaker at the Isthmus Green Day event to be held on April 26 at the Monona Terrace.

SAGE student Jill Baumgartner wins Fulbright Award, a highly competitive international study and exchange program that seeks to build intellectual and cultural relationships between the U.S. and other countries. Jill will be conducting epidemiology research on indoor air pollution and health in rural Yunnan, China.

Jonathan Patz Recognized in Madison Magazine as one of Madison's "Green Heroes" – 25 of the area's savviest, smartest, boldest, well-intentioned and hardest-working stewards of justice, humanity and the environment. read the article

SAGE PhD candidate Matt Johnston's paper on international biodiesel production wins Editor's Choice Award. read more

Holly Gibbs' paper, "Monitoring and estimating tropical forest carbon stocks: making REDD a reality" selected as part of Environmental Research Letters Best of 2007. The "Best of 2007" is a mixture of Perspectives and Letters that best represent the high quality and breadth of the contributions that were published last year in ERL, as chosen by the Editorial Board, guest editors and publishing team. read more