Graduate students awarded ARCS Foundation scholarships
2023 ARCS Scholarship awardees (clockwise from top left): Katherine Ackerman, Evan Kelly, Josefa Muñoz, Gabrielle Stedman, Leon Tran.
The ARCS Foundation Honolulu Chapter selected five graduate students in the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology to receive ARCS Scholarships. At the 2023 ARCS Scholars Banquet recently, the foundation provided $5,000 awards to 20 University of Hawai‘i at Manoa doctoral candidates who were named ARCS Scholars.
The five 2023 Honolulu ARCS Scholars from the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology are listed below. For more information about each scholar, visit ARCS Foundation Honolulu Current Scholars.
Katherine Ackerman
Katherine (Katie) Ackerman, a doctoral candidate in Atmospheric Sciences with Alison Nugent, was selected to receive the George and Mona Elmore Award. Additionally, she was named ARCS Scholar of the Year for Physical Sciences. Her research is focused on sea salt aerosols, which play important roles in cloud generation and precipitation initiation. Strong winds and breaking waves send tons of salt particles into the atmosphere, yet the precise amount and environmental factors producing them is unknown. Katie hopes to find a link between local aerosol fluctuations and rainfall patterns across the islands. She spends time at the beach gathering sea salt aerosol samples to better understand how Hawai‘i’s dynamic coastlines contribute to the production and transport of these particles up to our clouds. In addition to her research, Katie is the Development Coordinator for the Graduate Women In Science–Hawai‘i group at UH Mānoa.
Evan Kelly
Evan Kelly, a doctoral candidate in Earth Sciences with Shiv Sharma in the Hawai‘i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, was selected to receive the Toby Lee ARCS Award. Evan works on evaluating, testing, and developing instrumentation for planetary exploration missions, focusing on Raman photon scattering and spectroscopy for unambiguous identification of minerals and compounds. The goal is a high-resolution instrument that is robust, lightweight, compact and reliable enough for space missions. Additionally, he is working on evaluating the plausibility of placing a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer on Titan to study the lakes as well as the possibility of utilizing it on other planetary bodies such as Venus, Enceladus, and Mars.
Josefa Muñoz
Josefa (Sefa) Muñoz, a doctoral candidate in the Marine Biology Graduate Program with the Toonen-Bowen lab at the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology, was selected to receive a Maybelle F. Roth ARCS Award in Conservation Biology. Additionally, she was named ARCS Scholar of the Year for Biological Sciences. Sefa studies the love lives of Guam’s green sea turtles. Warmer nest temperatures produce more female sea turtles, which makes ongoing climate change a concern for populations worldwide. With suspected feminization of Guam’s green sea turtles, where more than 90% are likely to be female, Sefa aims to determine if they have one or many mates, which can act as a buffer for the female-skewed bias, as well as count the number of successfully mating males and females.
Gabrielle Stedman
Gabrielle Stedman, a doctoral candidate in Oceanography with Craig Smith and Erica Goetze, was selected to receive the George and Marie Elmore ARCS Award. Her research on the biogeography of abyssal zooplankton is describing, for the first time, microscopic animals living on and near the abyssal seafloor—one of the most biodiverse and least explored habitats on Earth. Knowing who lives there, where and why will contribute to appropriate conservation and mitigation strategies. She has secured more than $51,000 to support the research and produced reports for the International Seabed Authority that were critical in enlarging protected area coverage.
Leon Tran
Leon Tran, a doctoral candidate in the Marine Biology Graduate Program with Jacob Johansen at the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology, was selected to receive ARCS Foundation Honolulu Award. Leon cares about fish and fishermen. He studies the resilience of commonly fished species in Hawaiʻi to the current and future challenges of climate change, namely marine heatwaves, using physiological experiments. His goal is to understand how fish populations respond to climate change and how fishing communities may adapt in the future. Leon is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and Co-Boss of Nerd Nite Honolulu.
The ARCS Foundation non-profit volunteer group that works to advance science in America by providing unrestricted funding to outstanding U.S. graduate students in STEM fields. The Honolulu chapter has provided more than $2.7 million to UH more than 650 graduate students since 1974.