Three UC Santa Cruz Ph.D. candidates have been awarded 2016-2017 fellowships from the American Association of University Women (AAUW).
The three awards are out of 69 the AAUW granted nationwide this year and are the most UC Santa Cruz has received in a single year.
Winners of AAUW American Fellowships are Lizzy Hare, anthropology; Anna Rosen, astronomy and astrophysics; and Justine Smith, environmental studies. The fellowships will provide support as the women complete their dissertations.
Hare conducted fieldwork for her dissertation in northwest Indiana, where she worked with ecological scientists and land managers to understand how competing narratives about the environment come to be made and how those narratives become ethical claims about what the landscape once was and what it could or should be in the future.
At UCSC, she has been an active member of the Science & Justice Research Center, which supports innovative approaches to social justice through collaborative, interdisciplinary research.
Smith studies how humans alter ecosystem dynamics by influencing the behavior of predators. She works with the Santa Cruz Puma Project to investigate how humans induce fear responses in pumas, which indirectly affect puma prey and competitors. While at UCSC, she has mentored 43 undergraduate interns, given 25 public talks, created a local citizen science program, and founded the Santa Cruz chapter of the Society for Conservation Biology. (A photograph of Smith tracking pumas in the Santa Cruz Mountains is one of the lead images on the AAUW's web site.)
American Fellowships are the AAUW’s oldest and largest funding program, dating back to 1888 and making them one of the oldest and most prestigious fellowships in the world exclusively for women. AAUW American Fellowships support women scholars who are completing doctoral dissertations, conducting postdoctoral research, or finishing research for publication.
“We have a long and proud history of supporting exceptional women scholars through our American Fellowship program,” said Gloria Blackwell, AAUW vice president of fellowships, grants, and global programs. "This year’s group includes women who are leaders in their institutions and their fields working on issues related to sexual violence, race, and other topics of importance to women and girls. They aren’t just brilliant, they are agents of change.”
For the 2016–2017 academic year, AAUW awarded $3.7 million to more than 230 scholars, research projects, and programs promoting education and equity for women and girls through six fellowships and grants programs. AAUW is one of the world’s leading supporters of graduate women’s education, having awarded more than $100 million in fellowships, grants, and awards to 12,000 women from more than 140 countries since 1888.
