Spotlight Postdoc

A conversation with Jonathan Henn, 2024 ��ɫ��Ƶ postdoc of the year

David J Lubinski — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 19:54:41 +0000

A conversation with Jonathan Henn, 2024 ��ɫ��Ƶ postdoc of the year David J Lubinski Fri, 01/10/2025 - 12:54

Gabe Allen

Jonathan Henn has quickly become an eminent plant ecologist with work on alpine plant communities and grassland wildfires. He reflects on his research journey so far.

Jonathan Henn

This fall, Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation and Dean of the Institutes Massimo Ruzzene named INSTAAR’s Jonathan Henn an Outstanding Postdoc of the year. The award recognizes only two postdoctoral scholars from the entire ��ɫ��Ƶ system each year. Henn was chosen for his excellence in research productivity, innovation, communication, leadership, and advocacy for justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.

During his postdoc, Henn is working with INSTAAR faculty fellow Katharine Suding to characterize long-term change in alpine plant communities and study fire regimes in grasslands. Though he is an early-career scientist, he has published 26 peer-reviewed papers and secured over $700,000 in research funding. Several of his recent papers have been cited over 100 times.

As Henn’s time as a postdoc nears its end, INSTAAR sat down with the hard-working young scientist to reflect on his research journey.

Did you always want to be an ecologist? How did you find your way to studying plant communities?

I'm from Minnesota and my family had a lake cabin up in northern Wisconsin. As a kid, I spent a lot of time out in the woods just running around finding cool plants. Going into college, I already thought biology was really cool. At first I thought birds were my thing. But then, for my first summer internship, I did restoration monitoring in natural areas around campus. It hooked me, and it all just went from there.

It's an awesome job, I think, because you get paid to go to all kinds of really interesting places and just try to figure out what's going on. Hopefully your work leads to a better understanding of these natural systems. And, if you better understand how things are happening, you might be able to manage and restore ecosystems in a way that can preserve nature.

Working high up on Niwot Ridge, Colorado

You’ve published a ton of work during your time at INSTAAR. What is a highlight?

We just published a paper on alpine plant responses to climate change that represents a large part of my postdoctoral work. We found that things are changing in a really wide variety of ways.

The difficult thing that a lot of researchers have encountered is that alpine plants live for a long time and are relatively slow to respond to things. That's one of the really awesome things about the Niwot Ridge Long-Term Ecological Research Project. We have really long term datasets that can start to capture these slow responses.

Subalpine meadow, Colorado.

It’s still messy — different plant species are responding in different ways. But one way that we can cut through that variation is by thinking about characteristics of plants that might relate to the way that they grow, survive, and experience their environment. You can sort of characterize plants as having more of a live fast, die young strategy where they grow really fast and don't live as long. Other plants have a more conservative, slow-growing strategy, and these species are very common in Alpine and Arctic environments.

When you start to split it up like that, you start to see patterns. It seems that the live fast, die young plants are having more success under global change conditions. On the other hand, the really stress tolerant, slower growing plant species are tending to decline through time.

What are you most proud of during your time as postdoctoral scholar with INSTAAR?

I've worked with a really wide variety of people and a wide variety of projects, and that's been really satisfying. It all stems from my involvement with Niwot Ridge. There's so many awesome people doing really cool things.

Recently I've been really involved in this grassland fuels project. People from the Boulder city and county governments came to my advisor, Katie Suding, after the Marshall fire. They were under a lot of pressure to figure out how to prevent it from happening again. They were looking for a way to manage the grasslands in a way that could reduce wildfire risk. Katie realized that we don't really know anything about the efficacy of different management strategies and what sort of side effects they might have.

It’s a unique project because it came from this specific question and need that managers had. We wrote a proposal, got a grant funded, and that’s been my focus for the last year-and-a-half or so. Now we’re getting a big project off the ground that's super collaborative. We’re integrating folks in Boulder as well as Louisville and Superior and Longmont. It’s been a really interesting experience doing research that's management focused and has, hopefully, very actionable outcomes.

If you have questions about this story, or would like to reach out to INSTAAR for further comment, you can contact Senior Communications Specialist Gabe Allen at gabriel.allen@colorado.edu.

Jonathan Henn has quickly become an eminent plant ecologist with work on alpine plant communities and grassland wildfires. He reflects on his research journey so far.

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Annika Horlings: Icy reflections: Fieldwork and the calling to study glaciers (USPECS)

David J Lubinski — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 18:30:39 +0000

Annika Horlings: Icy reflections: Fieldwork and the calling to study glaciers (USPECS) David J Lubinski Tue, 11/26/2024 - 11:30

From serene Alaskan glaciers to harsh Antarctic winds, postdoc Annika Horlings shares her journey as a glaciologist exploring icy landscapes. Her research focuses on polar near-surface processes that are important in the mass balance of alpine glaciers and ice sheets, how these processes work, and how they are changing through time.

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Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship for Faculty Diversity 2024 (RIO)

Anonymous — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship for Faculty Diversity 2024 (RIO) Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/23/2024 - 00:00

Peyton Thomas (INSTAAR & ENVS) is one of three awardees of the 2024-25 Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship for Faculty Diversity. She will study fish ecology along the Yukon River in Alaska, improving physiological and behavioral understanding. Additionally, she will use her platform as an elite athlete to advocate for environmental and social change across academia, industry and government.

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Take 5 with Michael Dyonisius

Anonymous — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 21:32:20 +0000

Take 5 with Michael Dyonisius Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 04/30/2024 - 15:32

Five questions and answers with Michael Dyonisius, a postdoc with INSTAAR’s Laboratory for AMS Radiocarbon Preparation and Research, a keen investigator of greenhouse gas fluxes, and an occasional ukulele-playing indie pop fan. Read on to learn about Michael’s work, inspirations, and life.

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Scientist, Olympic hopeful runs with real purpose (Colorado Arts & Sciences Magazine)

Anonymous — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Scientist, Olympic hopeful runs with real purpose (Colorado Arts & Sciences Magazine) Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/30/2024 - 00:00

Clay Bonnyman Evans

��ɫ��Ƶ postdoctoral researcher Peyton Thomas, who fuses running with a commitment to environmental causes, to compete in U.S. Olympic women’s marathon trials in February.

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A passion for science and the outdoors fuels one woman’s drive to combat climate change (Rocky Mountain PBS)

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 06:00:00 +0000

A passion for science and the outdoors fuels one woman’s drive to combat climate change (Rocky Mountain PBS) Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/21/2022 - 00:00

INSTAAR postdoctoral scholar Peyton Thomas loves being in nature, but as a scientist she is well-aware of the threat climate change poses to our environment. She also hopes to inspire the next generation of Black women scientists.

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Mette Bendixen receives the AGU Science for Solutions Award

Anonymous — Wed, 11 Nov 2020 07:00:00 +0000

Mette Bendixen receives the AGU Science for Solutions Award Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/11/2020 - 00:00

The American Geophysical Union has announced that INSTAAR postdoctoral scholar Mette Bendixen is the recipient of their 2020 Science for Solutions Award.

The Science for Solutions Award is given annually to a student or postdoctoral scientist in recognition of significant contributions in the application and use of the Earth and space science to solve societal problems.

The award follows Bendixen’s out-of-the-box work on an overlooked global challenge: the scarcity of sand resources.

Bendixen’s research was focused on understanding how coasts of Greenland respond to change processes induced by climate change. She said, “Our research has proven that as the Greenland Ice Sheet melts, it’s not only water that drains into the ocean. Massive amounts of sand are deposited along the coast in deltas, actually causing the coast of Greenland to extent further into the sea (prograding). This is exactly opposite of a majority of the Arctic coasts, that erode due to permafrost thaw, increasing open-water season, and increased wave erosion. To put it a little simplisticly, you can say that Greenland is growing bigger simply because massive amounts of sand are transported through meltwater rivers and deposited along the coast.”

Soon after publishing a paper on prograding Greenland deltas, Bendixen was surprised to learn the extent of the world’s need for sand. “At the same time, I was stunned to see how little scientific focus this critical topic had,” she said. “I mean, after water, sand is the most extracted natural resource on Earth. And this extraction can have huge consequences for human and nature—all while it provides key building blocks for our modern society.”

The thought wouldn’t let go: could Greenland’s sand supply an increasingly starving world market?

An exploration of the topic led to a string of high-impact journal articles and an interactive feature and front-page story in the New York Times.

Bendixen said the implications of sand export from Greenland for the environment, carbon emissions, and tourism would need to be considered carefully before Greenland decides to go forward with the idea. “There really are numerous questions that must be fully understood in order for Greenland to decide if to exploit this material,” she explained.

But she insists the decision should rest with the people of Greenland. “Who am I to say that Greenland should or shouldn’t use their natural resources?” she asked. “I want to learn about Greenland’s own opinion on this.” Bendixen has received funding from the Danish Carlsberg Foundation to conduct a national household survey in Greenland to ask about opinions on a potential sand industry.

Irina Overeem, INSTAAR Fellow and Deputy Director of the Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System, works closely with Mette and recommended her for the AGU award. She said, “Mette is a highly creative scholar, but what really sets her apart is her drive to further her ideas with other experts. She posed this unusual question straddling science domains, in this case global change to sedimentary geology to economy to sustainability science. She then reached out to domain experts and discussed the ideas and brings them back into a paper. It was immediately policy-relevant for Greenlandic society; I found it being discussed in the economy section of Sermitsiaq, the national Greenlandic paper, while there on summer fieldwork.”

Bendixen said, “I have to be honest and say, that when I started working as a Research Fellow at INSTAAR in 2018 with Associate Professor Irina Overeem, I didn’t think I’d end up doing research on natural resources in Greenland… I’d encourage everyone to explore these “wild ideas” that come to mind—and do it with like-minded colleagues who also like to think big and a little crazy and aren’t afraid to ask the simple questions, that sometimes turn out to be not so straightforward.”

The American Geophysical Union has announced that INSTAAR postdoctoral scholar Mette Bendixen is the recipient of their 2020 Science for Solutions Award. The award follows Bendixen’s out-of-the-box work on an overlooked global challenge: the scarcity of sand resources.

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