January e-Newsletter Community Guest Spotlight with Anna Marshall
Posted Jan 7, 2025
Anna Marshall, Assistant Professor, University of Tennessee
Reflections as a CUAHSI Pathfinder
January marks the month before the CUAHSI Pathfinder Fellowship applications are due and in the spirit of that timing, I want to reflect on my experience as a Pathfinder. The Pathfinder Fellowship program provides travel funds to graduate students in hydrology and related sciences to make an extended trip to enhance their research by adding a field site to conduct comparative research, collaborating with a research group, or working with researchers on adding an interdisciplinary dimension to a project. Backing up a few years, in Fall 2022, I was in the middle of my PhD at Colorado State University when I stopped in at the CUAHSI booth at the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU) annual meetings and learned more about the Pathfinder Fellowship. As someone researching fluvial geomorphic response to disturbance in the Western U.S., I was eager to consider my place-based knowledge in the context of other catchments with different hydrologic and disturbance regimes. Around the same time, I had been talking with a colleague, Dr. Hiromi Uno, a stream ecologist at Tohoku University, who had told me about one of her study sites in Hokkaido, Japan that experienced episodic flooding and offered a rare glimpse into how rivers naturally respond to disturbance in the region due to the site’s limited human alterations. One of the aspects that excited me about the idea of working with Dr. Uno as a local host for a Pathfinder was the opportunity to think about a system interdisciplinarily from hydrologic, ecologic, and geomorphic lenses. Combining our skillsets, we developed a research project addressing the links between physical process drivers that govern the study area during flooding and how the ecological community responds. Jumping forward about six few months, I traveled to Japan on a Pathfinder Fellowship where we collected post-flood stream ecology, hydraulic, and geomorphologic data to understand the broader system response to disturbance. In addition to field work, we met with students at Hokkaido University, attended the joint Japan Engineering and Ecological Society meeting in Kyoto and toured river restoration sites around the greater Kyoto area, meeting with local groups working to restore river processes along the way.
Reflecting back on my experience, the Pathfinder Fellowship was far more than a travel reimbursement. It encouraged me to think about the impact I want my research to have, to engage in the process of reaching out to potential research collaborators, and to think about how I translate my research across languages, cultures, and audiences. Now, as an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, I’ve built on my Pathfinder by continuing to develop new arms of this research with intentionality in connecting water research across disciplines and borders. The results of my Pathfinder research will be published later this year, but the research project and collaborations from it are only continuing to grow. As I continue this work and start new projects, my experience as a Pathfinder is a constant reminder that examining water topics in a multidisciplinary way acknowledges the complexity of water and my hope is that many others continue to take advantage of the doors a Pathfinder Fellowship can open.