Nominator: Dr. Laura Lautz

Virginia (Ginny) Collins is a third-year PhD student at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in the Watershed Resources Engineering graduate degree program. She is being nominated by Laura Lautz, a faculty member at ESF and a member of Ginny’s steering committee.

Ginny is an exceptional graduate student who excels in her research and participates fully in the academic and graduate student community. Ginny has her undergraduate and Master’s degrees in engineering from Cornell University. Ginny’s graduate work at SUNY ESF is addressing the impact of urbanization and stream restoration projects on several hydrological and biological processes, including groundwater recharge, microbial communities, sediment transport in streams and the interaction of streams and ground water. Her research sites are located within the Onondaga Creek drainage basin, where urbanization influences stormflow to the Creek and several stream restoration projects have been implemented. Ginny’s research methods include computer modeling of groundwater flow, terminal restriction length polymorphism to measure the presence and composition of microbial communities and field monitoring of water fluxes across the stream-ground water interface. Ginny has presented her research at the Annual Finger Lakes Research Conference and the conference of the American Water Resources Association. She appears as a co-author in the Journal of Environmental Management.

In addition to her research, Ginny is actively involved in teaching and outreach. Last year, Ginny was the visiting instructor for Engineering Hydrology and Hydraulics (FEG 340/ ERE 540), a full semester core course in engineering at ESF, offered at both the graduate and undergraduate level. Ginny has been a Teaching Fellow at the ESF Colloquium on Teaching and Learning, where she coordinated and facilitated the new graduate assistant training. Ginny was also recently selected to join the competitive GK-12 program at ESF, an NSF-sponsored program that links graduate student research with curriculum development in the Syracuse city schools. Ginny is president of the Graduate Student Association at ESF and has been actively involved in a number of organizations, including the student chapter of the American Water Resources Association. In recognition of her active role on the ESF campus, Ginny was recently awarded the SUNY ESF Alumni Award to Graduate Students, which is an award that acknowledges excellence in research, teaching, public service, and community involvement.

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