The 2022 Graduate Student Committee at the All Scientists’ Meeting 2022.
Credit: Gabriel De La Rosa, CC BY-SA 4.0
The LTER Graduate Student Committee was established to foster interaction among graduate students working at LTER sites and between students and senior LTER scientists, to create student opportunities for intersite research, and to develop interdisciplinary graduate student training programs. Membership includes student representatives from each of the LTER sites.
Recent activities include virtual career webinars for non-academic careers (in 2020) and for academic careers at a diversity of institutions (in 2021) and a visual media series in 2023-2024.
The graduate student committee organizes the LTER Community Instagram account, occasional social media campaigns, and contributions to the Short Stories About Long-Term Research (SSALTER) blog. Regional graduate student get-togethers began in 2019 with a gathering of Jornada, Sevilleta, and Niwot Ridge students.
As of May 2025, the committee chairs are Joey Krieger Lodge (NWT) and Eamon Hennessy (GCE). The committee representative to the LTER Executive Board is Jessie Motes.
For a listing of current graduate student representatives, please visit the LTER directory and filter by committee.
Currently active subcommittees or working groups:
- Community working group: ensures that committee documents are up to date and creates documentation when needed.
- Social media working group: facilitates digital media interactions between LTER sites by sharing experiences through managing a blog and overseeing the LTER Instagram account.
- Events &initiatives working group: develops and organizes events across the LTER network with a focus on catering to graduate student interests and needs.
2024 Accomplishments
Community Working Group
- Created GSC Representative Orientation Packet
- Created GSC Representative Orientation Checklist
- Created GSC Representative Roles and Responsibilities document
- Revised GSC By-laws document
Social Media Working Group
- SSALTERBlog had 13 new posts in the last year
- Instagram had 35 posts in the last year
Events & Initiatives Working Group
- Updated RFP for GSC events (however, we are no longer using this because allocation of funds by the LNO has changed)
- Visual media series (https://lternet.edu/stories/introducing-the-lter-visual-media-webinar-series/)
- Three interactive webinars on communicating science visually including speakers from Scientific American and Nature
- RFPenabled us to recruit fantastic speakers and compensate them for their time ($1000 each), especially for the personalized feedback for LTER attendees who submitted work
- 242registrants, 131 live attendees, and 333 YouTube views of the recordings from the first two seminars
