Angela Linn defended her Ph.D. dissertation “Preserving Reflections of Ourselves: The Past, Present, and Future of Alaska’s Museums” in October 2023. Read more to learn about her work on the history and future of museums in Alaska.

We got the chance to sit in on Jessie Christian’s M.S. Thesis defense in Geoscience on Friday morning, February 24th, 2023. Her research project, entitled, “Citizen Science: Shoreline Change Monitoring in Southwest Alaska,” took her to two sites in Dillingham and Chignik Bay where she collected data alongside coastal communities to monitor shoreline erosion and add to our understanding of the effects of climate change.

Akashia Martinez successfully defended her Biological Sciences M.S. thesis titled "Kit-rearing in the far north: Movement behavior and activity patterns of female Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis) during the denning season." Her study is part of the Northwest Boreal Forest Lynx Project, which combines efforts here at UAF with research from the National Park Service and U.S. Fish & Wildlife, with the overall goal of providing a better understanding of the relationship between two important species, Canada lynx and their favorite prey, snowshoe hares. Akashia’s impressively thorough work movement behavior and activity pattern of denning mothers provides an important piece of the lynx-research puzzle.

February 16, 2023, Geoscientist Jordan Jenckes successfully defended his dissertation entitled “Variability of Hydrogeochemistry and Chemical Weathering Regimes in High Latitude Glacierized Coastal Catchments.” This is the culmination of four years of research, including field work and data analysis, in the Gulf of Alaska watershed.

Exploring Xochiyolloh Harbison’s thesis exhibition Hysterical and what it has to say about the tampon tax in the United States.

Lauren Sutton is a marine biologist from Washington, who recently defended her Ph.D. Dissertation studying Arctic Epibenthic Communities. She is now a research coordinator at the Kachemak Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve in Homer, Alaska.