Benjamin Miller, an EEB master’s student, has been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. The awards have a long history of recipients who achieve high levels of success in their future academic and professional careers. He will receive $30,000 a year for three years and an additional $12,000 annually for healthcare and tuition.

"My primary research interests are carbon dioxide and methane dynamics throughout freshwater lakes and hydropower complexes, particularly at the sediment-water interface,” said Miller. “With my advisor, Professor George Kling, I will be working at Lake Toolik, Imnaviat Creek, and other sites on Alaska's North Slope to study the role terrestrially-derived organic matter in carbon dioxide and methane fluxes (important greenhouse gases) within Arctic lakes and streams. Using this and other data that has been collected over the last 25 years at Toolik, we hope to be able to discern how such systems are changing over time, and why. In the future, I would like to use what I learn in Michigan and Alaska to better understand and assess the ways in which a globally expanding and nationally contracting hydropower infrastructure alters carbon and other nutrient cycling within river basins."

The NSF GRF Program (GRFP) recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported disciplines who are pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees in the U.S. and abroad. As the oldest graduate fellowship of its kind, the reputation of the GRFP follows recipients and often helps them become life-long leaders that contribute significantly to both scientific innovation and teaching. Past fellows include numerous Nobel Prize winners