FNR Celebrates Awards, Honors from Spring, Summer 2026

Several Forestry and Natural Resources students, staff and recent alumni have been recognized for their scholarship, research and outreach this spring and summer.

Jarred Brooke, Extension wildlife specialist, was honored with the Career Achievement Award at the Fire in Eastern Oak Forests Conference in June. In addition to his extension work with wildlife, Brooke has been deeply involved with prescribed fire, serving as chair of the Indiana Prescribed Fire Council since 2018, working to implement prescribed fire policy in Indiana and organizing more than 30 Learn-N-Burn and prescribed fire field days and workshops that provide landowners and professionals with practical experience in fire safety, timing and ecological benefits. Brooke also has co-instructed the undergraduate FNR 333 Applied Fire Ecology course since 2019. He was instrumental in acquiring funding from the Sam Shine Foundation to hire Danielle Howard, the recently hired Extension prescribed fire specialist.

Brooke also was one of three main instructors and organizers of the Indiana Land Stewardship Leadership Academy, which graduated its first class this spring. He was honored in 2021 with the Purdue Cooperative Extension Specialists’ Association and the PK-12 Council’s Staff Excellence Award for his work with youth audiences, expanding their interest in and preparation for careers in natural resource sciences.  

Nathan Shoaf, a PhD student set to graduate in August from Dr. Zhao Ma’s lab, has been selected as a 2026 Future Leaders Forum (FLF) Fellow by the Association for International Agriculture and Rural Development (AIARD).

The Future Leaders Forum is AIARD's premier fellowship initiative designed to recognize and empower the next generation of leaders committed to solving global challenges in agriculture, food security, rural development, and environmental sustainability. The AIARD Future Leader Fellowship is a highly competitive program — this year selected from a pool of 71 applicants — designed to identify and support outstanding students pursuing careers in international agriculture and rural development. Fellows are selected through a rigorous process based on academic excellence, leadership potential, and dedication to international development.

As a 2026 FLF Fellow, Nathan will:

• Participate in AIARD's 2026 Annual Conference in Arlington, Virginia (Washington, DC area) from June 3–5, under the theme "Women Farmers. Food Systems. The Future of Global Development."
• Take part in the FLF Professional Development Day on June 3rd — an immersive, behind-the-scenes experience providing direct engagement with professionals from the World Bank Group, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, and other leading institutions shaping global agriculture and rural development. This unique experience is designed to give fellows practical insights into career pathways and entry points into the field.
• Engage in high-level policy dialogues, leadership workshops, and networking sessions with professionals from multilateral institutions, NGOs, governments, and academia.
• Join a growing network of AIARD alumni who are making a global impact in international agriculture and rural development.

 Through this experience, Nathan will gain unique exposure to real-world development challenges, global professional networks and practical career pathways, while also strengthening their leadership and communication skills.

Natalie Allen, a PhD student in Dr. Andrew DeWoody’s lab, was honored as a Fulbright Program semifinalist.  Allen’s research looks at several animal species, using genome sequencing to answer questions with conservation implications. In 2025, she traveled to Nogales, Mexico, partially funded by the D. Woods Thomas Memorial Fund, to meet up with collaborators who have been collecting samples of Montezuma Quail, a species of conservation concern. Allen’s dissertation includes chapters on the western chicken turtle, a freshwater turtle found in the south-central United States, and also on gray whales, whose populations were hunted to near-extinction during the whaling era but have since rebounded.

Elena Boughton, a May 2026 wildlife alumna, has received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program grant. Boughton will be studying purple martins as a PhD student in the Aeroecology Lab under Dr. Kyle Horton beginning this fall.

Since 1952, the NSF graduate research fellowship program has supported outstanding graduate students who are pursuing full-time, research-based masters and doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering or math, including education. The program aims to ensure the quality, vitality and strength of the scientific and engineering workforce in the United States. The full list of 2026 GRFP awardees is available on the NSF website.

Katy Dix, a PhD student in Dr. Zhao Ma’s Human Dimensions Lab, has received the D. Woods Thomas Memorial Fund award for the third time (also 2023, 2024). The Woods fellowship has supported Dix’s PhD and independent research. In 2023, she received support for her doctoral research, which included community-driven research focused on collaborative wildfire management as part of a larger team and water sovereignty, both in the Monkoxi Indigenous territory of Monte Verde in Bolivia. The most recent award will support the return of results will bring actors together to close out a water sovereignty research program to collaboratively discuss how to address the problems they identified during prior research. Community scientists from the territory will evaluate existing best practices and opportunities for growth. In addition to generating collective insights, this collaborative approach aims to strengthen relationships between diverse actors to facilitate effective collaboration and implementation of the proposed suggestions long-term.

Jean Fritz Saint Preux, a PhD student working with Dr. Mo Zhou, received the People’s Choice Award for the quality and engagement of his presentation on “Influence or Interference? Understanding Crowding Effects in Forest Management Adoption” at the 2026 joint meeting of the International Society of Forest Resource Economics (ISFRE) and Western Forest Economists (WFE) in Fort Collins, Colorado. He also was named as the recipient of a conference scholarship to attend the Association of Consulting Foresters national conference June 27-30 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Sarah Grimes and Adebola Adeniji, both graduate students in the Center for Global Soundscapes with Dr. Bryan Pijanowski, received the MSU-NASA Professional Enhancement Award at the International Association for Landscape Ecology-North America conference. The NASA-MSU Professional Enhancement Awards are made possible by support from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Michigan State University (MSU). The program has supported approximately 480 students and other junior scholars from approximately 200 institutions worldwide since 1998 to present their research and interact with leading scientists and other attendees at international meetings.

Rising senior aquatic sciences major Morgan Hamilton and rising junior wildlife major Lauren Toepp have both been named as recipients of the Gilman Scholarship by the Purdue National and International Scholarships Office.

The U.S. Department of State’s Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program (Gilman Program) supports and encourages students to study or intern abroad in all world regions and from all U.S. states, academic fields and types of institutions so as to develop a generation of future American leaders with the career skills and international networks to advance U.S. interests. 

Hamilton will study marine megafauna in Turks and Caicos this summer, while Toepp traveled to Sweden and Norway for the Sustainable Natural Resources study abroad trip, led by Drs. Tomas Hook and Doug Jacobs in June/July.