2022 Henrietta Hutton Research Grant recipient Jasmine Brown checking the contents of a malaise trap, used to collect flying insects, at the top of the mountainous ridges found at Skálanes, Iceland. Credit: Yvonne Findlay.
After two years of disruption to travel and field research, it is excellent to see university students going back into the field. In 2022, thanks to generous support from donors, the Society’s grants programme has allocated grant funding to support 20 undergraduate and masters students to undertake field research this year.
Peter Smith Award
We are awarding the Peter Smith Award for the first time to Lucy Friend, Emily Willans and Molly Aspinwall from Newcastle University. Lucy, Emily and Molly will be researching supraglacial pond pollution and the composition and successional patterns of vegetation at the Glacier de Miage and Lex Blanche Glacier, Italy.
Peter Smith was a long-standing supporter and Trustee of the Society. The Award is established in recognition of Peter’s commitment to fieldwork and student learning.
Shara Dillon Award
The Shara Dillon Award is given to Cassie Dummett and Joe Langley (University College London), and Joseph Kanyama Tabu (University of Kisangani), for their research investigating how people, plants and birds function and interact in the Congo Basin peatlands.
The Award is given in memory of Shara Dillon, a keen adventurer and enthusiastic participant in the Society’s annual Explore conference. Shara was a teacher born and raised in rural Zimbabwe and South Africa. With a deep love for remote African wilderness and an interest in conservation, Shara had been helping the Northern Rangelands Trust with strategies to curb tribal and human-wildlife conflict in Northern Kenya. In 2016, Shara paddled Lake Tanganyika in East Africa, the longest lake in the world, and in past years her adventures took her through the Canadian wilderness, up Kilimanjaro, through Iceland and into the Jordanian desert where she spent time with the Bedouin in Wadi Rum.
Fieldwork Apprenticeships
These awards give students, who would otherwise not have the opportunity, the experience working on a research project led by an academic member of staff at their university. The awards are supported through by a generous donation from John and Anne Alexander.
This year’s recipients are Alice Jardine and Christopher Edmunds (University of Oxford), who will be joining the DRY-CAB project investigating the role of the Congo Air Boundary, and Eleanor Hall (University of Hertfordshire), joining field research in Svalbard studying permafrost induced landslides.
Geographical Fieldwork Grants
This year, Geographical Fieldwork Grants have also been awarded to:
Eleanor Leadbeater, Rebecca White, Alex Burton and Sam Eveleigh (Newcastle University), to study the effects on climate change on the cryosphere in Svalbard.
Lucia Hudson, Suzannah Egleston, Aoife Cantwell-Jones (Imperial College London) for fieldwork in Sweden researching how insect pollinators respond to climate change.
Jakub Domanski, Ursula Shaw, Robert Kunzmann and Madeleine Ary Hahne (University of Cambridge), to research climate change impacts on glaciers in southern Greenland.
The Geographical Fieldwork Grants are generously supported by a number of donors including The Jeremy Willson Charitable Trust, Neil Thomas Proto and HR Mill Trust Fund, Gumby Award and Edinburgh Trust.
Henrietta Hutton Research Grants
This year’s undergraduate and masters student recipients of Henrietta Hutton Research Grants are Jasmine Brown (University of Glasgow), for field research investigating the abundance, distribution, richness and evenness of invertebrates in Iceland, and Holly Elgar (University of Essex) who will be collating field data on seagrass distribution and species richness/abundance off Kenya’s Vanga coastline.
Monica Cole Research Grants
This year’s masters student recipient of the Monica Cole Research Grant is Lucy Weidner (University of Edinburgh), for field research studying the relationship between soil erosion and organic carbon, tracking the movement of carbon over the last few thousand years through the landscape around Stóraborg southern Iceland.
The next deadlines for the Society’s grants for undergraduate and masters students are in February 2023.
Find a grant and apply.
Grants are awarded subject to recipients receiving full approval from their university for fieldwork and research to take place.