2025 TUNDRA Award Recipients

Claire Bachand

Project: Linking microbial respiration to macro-scale carbon dynamics

Claire Bachand standing in tundra near sampling site Claire Bachand is a first-year Earth System Science Ph.D. student at the University of �Ӱ�pro Fairbanks. She is advised by Eugenie Euskirchen, and her research focuses on identifying and modeling drivers of soil respiration in the Arctic. Bachand is particularly interested in drivers of wintertime respiration and how shifting snow patterns might impact the Arctic carbon balance. In her PhD, she hopes to improve how Earth System Models represent permafrost carbon emissions to ultimately inform climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. With the Tundra Award, Bachand aims to disentangle how moisture, temperature, and plant type interact to control soil respiration through a series of soil incubation experiments. These results will be used to tune model parameterizations. She will work alongside UAF Ph.D. student, Morgan Brown, to collect and analyze Toolik soil samples.

Prior to beginning her Ph.D., Bachand earned a degree in Data Science at UC Berkeley, where she first became interested in cold regions and the Arctic through several research experiences. After she graduated, she studied Arctic snow as a research assistant at Los Alamos National Lab.

*joint project with Morgan Brown

Morgan Brown

Project: Linking microbial respiration to macro-scale carbon dynamics

Morgan Brown is a Biology Ph.D. student in the Muscarella Lab at the University of �Ӱ�pro Fairbanks. She is interested in understanding microbial community responses to environmental change and the subsequent impacts on ecosystem functions. Brown's current research aims to understand the micro-scale mechanisms driving microbial community composition in degraded ice-wedge permafrost to improve predictions of macro-scale carbon emissions. The Arctic is projected to get wetter and warmer, which will have impacts on vegetation and soil microbial communities that ultimately affect carbon fluxes. In collaboration with fellow UAF Ph.D. student Claire Bachand, Brown will use the Tundra Award to sample soils from various vegetation types at a site that has been monitored for carbon dioxide flux since 2019. They will compare bottle incubation results from temperature and moisture manipulations with those from an Earth System Model to better understand the individual mechanisms.

Prior to entering her program at UAF, Brown studied wetlands ecology at California State University Long Beach and worked for the �Ӱ�pro Department of Environmental Conservation in the Water Quality Monitoring and Assessment program.

*joint project with Claire Bachand

Emma Chandler

Project: Sex-specific demographic responses to climate change in the Arctic and alpine cushion plant Silene acaulis

Emma Chandler headshot

Emma Chandler is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Plant Biology at the University of Georgia. She is broadly interested in how Arctic and alpine plant species respond to climate change, with a particular focus on mating system evolution. Chandler is currently using field observations, experimental work, and modeling approaches to understand how the mating system of Silene acaulis (gynodioecy) influences its persistence across environmental gradients and how climate change may disrupt these patterns. Climate-driven shifts in population dynamics and ultimately the evolutionary trajectory of a species are particularly interesting in the context of the diverse and unique plant communities adapted to harsh environments like the Arctic.

With support from the Tundra Award, Chandler will be leveraging a 25-year demographic dataset to examine sex-specific contributions to population growth and decline across the latitudinal range of Silene acaulis, spanning from the Southern Rockies to the Arctic. While many temperate plant species have separate sexes, this nuance is often ignored in demographic studies. By identifying the life stages or traits most vulnerable to changing conditions, her research aims to improve our understanding of how plant populations are impacted by climate change.

Preston Kemeny

Project: Influence Of Active Layer Deepening On Oxidative Weathering Rates In Permafrost Landscapes

Preston Kemeny taking notes by a forest stream Preston is an isotope geochemist and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago studying how biogeochemical processes generate and regulate planetary habitability. Kemeny previously completed his Ph.D. at Caltech, where he used sulfur isotope ratios to quantify sulfide oxidation in river systems around the world, and has also studied Cambrian carbonate rocks and the modern marine nitrogen cycle. At Toolik, he will work with Marisa Repasch to collect samples from the Atigun River system to quantify the oxidation of sulfide minerals and rock-bound organic carbon associated with permafrost thaw. In combining isotope geochemistry with trace metal and geomorphic analyses, this work with constrain the mechanisms underlying changing alkalinity and carbon fluxes in Arctic landscape.

*joint project with Marisa Repasch

Marisa Repasch

Project: Influence Of Active Layer Deepening On Oxidative Weathering Rates In Permafrost Landscapes

Marisa Repasch samples water from a mountain river

Marisa Repasch is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences at the University of New Mexico. She is an Earth surface geochemist who focuses on understanding the roles of erosion, weathering, and sediment transport processes in the global carbon cycle. Most recently, she has been working to understand how permafrost thaw and hydrological drive changes in organic carbon fluxes in Arctic rivers.

Through the Toolik Tundra Award, Repasch will work with another early career researcher, Preston Kemeny, to study the effects of permafrost active layer deepening on oxidative weathering of rock organic carbon and sulfide minerals in the Brooks Range, �Ӱ�pro. While at Toolik Field Station this summer, they will collect rock, water, and suspended sediment samples from the mountainous Atigun River catchment to characterize spatial patterns in weathering fluxes. Geochemical analyses of these pilot samples will be integrated with geomorphic analyses and active layer depth measurements to help constrain the physical mechanisms driving changes in river chemistry across the Brooks Range.

*joint project with Preston Kemeny

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Tundra Awardees