Tibor T. Polgar Fellowship 25th Anniversary Celebration Fellowship Program Directory Tibor T. Polgar Fellowship 25th Anniversary Celebration Fellowship Program Directory Hudson River Foundation September 2009 Preface The Hudson River estuary stretches from its tidal limit at the Federal Dam at Troy, New York, to its merger with the New York Bight, south of New York City. Within that reach, the estuary displays a broad transition from tidal freshwater to marine conditions that are reflected in its physical composition and the biota it supports. These characteristics present a major opportunity and challenge for researchers to describe the makeup and workings of a complex and dynamic ecosystem. The Tibor Polgar Fellowship Program provides funds for graduate and undergraduate students to study selected aspects of the physical, chemical, biological, and public policy realms of the estuary. Since its inception in 1985, the program has provided approximately $1 million in funding to 189 students and can boast the involvement of 116 advisors from 64 institutions. The program is named in memory of Dr. Tibor T. Polgar, an estuarine biologist who was a key advisor to the Hudson River Foundation for Science and Environmental Research when the fellowship program was created. The program is conducted jointly by the Hudson River Foundation and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. The fellowships are funded by the Foundation. i Table of Contents Preface……………………………………………………………………….. i Table of Contents……………………………………………………………. iii Introduction………………………………………………………………….. v Tibor T. Polgar Fellows……………………………………………………... 1 Tibor T. Polgar Fellowship Advisors…………………………....................... 29 Tibor T. Polgar Administrators…………………………………………….... 37 Reports of the Tibor T. Polgar Fellowship…………………………………... 39 List of Publications by Tibor T. Polgar Fellows…………………………….. 53 iii Introduction The Tibor T. Polgar Fellowship Program is 25 years old this year, a “quatricentennial” coincidentally aligning with the great Henry Hudson Quadricentennial. Reflection in 2009 on all things Hudson is irresistible. As a scientist working in the world of estuarine and aquatic biology for the entire period since the “Polgars” were created, I have often encountered former fellows in a wide range of research and resource management activities. But perhaps the reach of the program was most vividly illustrated recently when I was attending a World Bank workshop on Caspian Sea sturgeon held in a small city in eastern Turkey. As the meeting began, a youngish scientist from Moscow informed me cryptically, “We’ve met before.” He did look familiar and I nodded and assumed we both had attended some international sturgeon gathering. A day later he quizzed me as to where we had met. I failed badly: He was a 1994 Polgar Fellow (from Rutgers) who had performed a fine genetics study on Hudson River killifish. Killifish are one of the myriad subjects tackled by Polgar Fellows since 1984. A hallmark of the program has been its diversity, an unusual simultaneous openness to undergraduates, Master’s, and doctoral students, and topics that have run from basic geology and hydrochemistry through contaminants, archaeology, autecology, food webs, fish communities, and public perceptions and policy concerning the river. The consequence has been an annual production of work, contained in yearly monographs, yielding an enormous amount of useful information. Some of the projects also have served as pilot studies for larger Hudson River Foundation grants, and many have produced quality peer-reviewed journal articles on their own. Moreover, in addition to making a significant contribution to our knowledge of the Hudson estuary, students have been trained in and well exposed to the realities—including the considerable pleasures—of studying estuarine biology. Whether clomping through muck in the marshes, running samples through equipment back in the lab, or both, these students have been privileged to take the measure of this remarkable estuary and, likely, to some degree, themselves. A quarter-century is a convenient marker for taking stock of a student program and celebrating its achievements. Enough time has elapsed for early graduates to have journeyed halfway through their professional careers, yet the beginning is still keenly recalled. The program sprang from the efforts of Betsy Blair of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and Dr. Jon Cooper, then the Science Officer of the Hudson River Foundation, to use federal funding associated with NOAA’s National Estuarine Research Reserve System to launch student summer fellowships in 1985. Dr. Tibor T. Polgar, a young but already influential and distinguished estuarine biologist, was advising the Hudson River Foundation at that time, and when he died suddenly in 1986, it seemed fitting to name this new program in his memory. In 1986, I became co-director of the program with Ms. Blair (and later, Chuck Nieder). During the first three years of the program, because of the particular federal funding source, all of the projects were required to be undertaken within the four Research Reserve sites in the Hudson. When direct federal underwriting ended in 1988, HRF began shouldering all the costs of the fellowships, with continuing and very supportive in-kind co-direction by NYSDEC, and the program was opened to projects anywhere within the Hudson estuary. v To scan the biographies included in this report is to come to know a cadre of competent and dedicated scientists and managers. The list of 203 projects undertaken by the Fellows demonstrates the extent to which the Polgar Program has advanced understanding of the Hudson ecosystem in crucial ways. The roster of fellowship advisors is a veritable pantheon of estuarine scientists working on the Hudson ecosystem. The extensive bibliography of Polgar participants’ continuing contributions to the scientific literature illustrates the impact of talent emanating from the careers of men and women who share a history of at least one student summer on and in the Hudson River. Without presuming too much credit for their success, the Polgar Program has surely been for each of them one of the stepping stones, those formative experiences that simultaneously inform and inspire and on which any successful scientific career is built. With luck, 25 new cohorts of eager students will learn about the river and then make a difference in the larger realm of environmental understanding by the time of the Polgar semicentennial, a quarter-century from now. John Waldman September 1, 2009 vi Fellows Tibor T. Polgar Fellows John Albertson 1992 John Albertson is currently Professor and W. H. Gardner, Jr., Department Chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Duke University. He received his B.S. in civil engineering from SUNY Buffalo; an MBA in Finance from the University of Hartford; a Masters in hydrology from Yale (where he was a Tibor T. Polgar fellow); and a Ph.D. in hydrologic science from the University of California at Davis. Before coming to Duke, he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia. Albertson’s research interests include surface hydrology, the effects of climate on semi-arid landscapes and water resources, hydroclimatic controls on infectious disease dynamics, and large eddy simulation of turbulence and turbulent transport in the lower atmosphere. He is currently leading an NSF study of climate impacts to water resources on Sardinia, a NASA study of climate impacts to the African savanna, and a NASA project on drought persistence in the southwestern US. Albertson is also adviser to the Irish EPA effort to develop a national assessment of the threats that land use and climate changes pose to Irish soil resources. ● Duke University ● Professor and W.H. Gardner Jr. Department Chair, Civil and Environmental Engineering ● Email: [email protected] ● Allan Barth Anderson 1988 Barth Anderson participated in several ecological research projects at the Institute for Ecosystems Studies (Millbrook, NY) after 1988, but his work transitioned to the private sector with land planning and design work around 1990. In 1993, he co-founded a coffee roasting business called the Barrington Coffee Roasting Company (www.barringtoncoffee.com) located in the Berkshires of Massachusetts (Lee, MA). Barrington Coffee is now in its sixteenth year. Barth has a wife, Lisa, a son, Aidan, and they live in Alford, MA. ● Email: [email protected] Kristin Arend 1995 Kristin Arend is an aquatic ecologist with an interest in freshwater fish communities and food web dynamics. She received her B.A. in biology from Oberlin College, M.S. in aquatic ecology from The Ohio State University, and Ph.D. in aquatic ecology from Cornell University. Dr. Arend’s research is aimed at understanding how natural and human-influenced environmental features (e.g., morphometry, nutrient loading, habitat type and availability) influence aquatic community structure, trophic interactions, and the flow of energy and other materials through the food web. She enjoys working on collaborative projects that span disciplines including hydrodynamics, biogeochemistry, and limnology. One of the most rewarding aspects of her career is mentoring undergraduates (certainly an outcome of her own undergraduate experiences conducting research on the Hudson River!). Starting August 2009, she will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences