Toolik Field Station names 2025 early career research awardees

July 1, 2025

The Institute of Arctic Biology’s Toolik Field Station has selected five recipients for their student and early career research Tundra Award in 2025. The donation-based award provides awardees with up to 10 days each to conduct an independent research project at the world’s largest Arctic research station, located in the northern foothills of 򽴫ý’s Brooks Range. 

This year’s awardees are:

  • Claire Bachand, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Biology and Wildlife at the University of 򽴫ý Fairbanks,
  • Morgan Brown, a Ph.D student in the Department of Biology and Wildlife at the University of 򽴫ý Fairbanks, 
  • Emma Chandler, a Ph.D student at the University of Georgia
  • Dr. Preston Kemeny, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago,
  • Dr. Marisa Repasch, an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico. 

Bachand and Brown’s Tundra Awards are supported by the William S. and Carelyn Y. Reeburgh Fieldwork Endowment for UAF graduate students.

Learn more about the awardees and their projects below or on the Toolik Field Station website.

Claire Bachand standing at a field site in the tundra.
Courtesy of Claire Bachand
Field portrait of Morgan Brown
Courtesy of Morgan Brown

Claire Bachand and Morgan Brown  |  Linking microbial respiration to macro-scale carbon dynamics

Bachand and Brown are partnering on a joint Tundra Award to understand how soil microbes will respond to a wetter and warmer Arctic, and what that means for the region’s carbon balance. They’ll sample tundra soils near Toolik Field Station and incubate them at different temperatures and moisture levels in the lab in Fairbanks. Afterwards, Bachand and Brown will use their findings to inform Earth system models to improve how the models predict permafrost carbon emissions.

 



 

Field portrait of Emma Chandler
Courtesy of Emma Chandler

Emma Chandler  |  Sex-specific demographic responses to climate change in the Arctic and alpine cushion plant Silene acaulis

Chandler is interested in how a warming Arctic is altering the population dynamics and evolutionary trajectory of tundra plants. Her project will add to a 25-year demographic dataset of the species moss campion (Silene acaulis) by examining sex-specific contributions to the plant’s population growth and decline, spanning from the Southern Rockies to the Arctic. Chandler’s focus on moss campion’s mating system, often ignored in plant population studies, will help identify the life stages or traits most vulnerable to change.

 

 

 

Preston Kemeny takes field notes on the banks of a forest stream.
Courtesy of Preston Kemeny
Marisa Repasch collects water samples from a mountain river.
Courtesy of Marisa Repasch

Preston Kemeny and Marisa Repasch  |  Influence Of Active Layer Deepening On Oxidative Weathering Rates In Permafrost Landscapes

Kemeny and Repasch are partnering on a joint Tundra Award to study the effects of permafrost thaw on the oxidative weathering of rock organic carbon and sulfide minerals in the Brooks Range. They’ll combine isotope geochemistry with trace metal and geomorphic analysis to characterize spatial patterns in weathering fluxes and identify the physical mechanisms underlying the changing alkalinity and carbon fluxes in “rusting” Arctic rivers.