Fisheries and Wildlife grad student receives CANR Graduate Student Teaching Award
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EmailTracy Melvin to receive 2020 CANR Graduate Student Teaching Award at ANR Week.
Tracy Melvin will receive the 2020 MSU College of Agriculture and Natural Resources (CANR) Graduate Student Teaching Award during ANR Week on March 6.
The CANR Graduate Student Teaching Award recognizes graduate students for their exceptional teaching skills, implementation of innovative techniques and their contributions to undergraduate programs and impact on students' careers and colleagues' teaching/advising practices.
Melvin is a teaching assistant and doctoral candidate in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. She has been a teaching assistant since summer 2015, and continually receives high reviews from students who take her classes. Because of her ability to connect with students, she was sought out to teach for Lyman Briggs and bioscience honors students. She has presented original lectures, created two original courses, and was awarded one of the few teaching assistantships in the department.
Through her teaching and research, Melvin has instructed and mentored over 200 students in five colleges at MSU. She goes above and beyond her teaching duties to mentor students about graduate school and Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) programs, both informally and formally.
Melvin’s research is focused on climate change adaptation in the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska. Her work is on the cutting edge of climate adaptation in wildlife management, as evidenced by being the only student on a blue-ribbon joint panel for the American Fisheries Society and The Wildlife Society. This is a working group on managing ecosystem transformation. She was invited to the Steering Committee of the National Fish, Wildlife and Plants Climate Adaptation Strategy and is currently co-writing a white paper to move strategy forward.
Melvin is a “Science to Action” fellow with the USGS’s Climate Adaptation Science Center. She has had her work filmed by Animal Planet and was recently awarded the 2019 National Climate Adaptation Student Leadership Award by the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies.
Melvin has served as a leadership development fellow for over three years for the CANR Graduate School. In this role, she created the event CANR Rising, where she coached high-level administrators in vulnerable storytelling and failure to build resilience through shared experiences. She has also received the Maison Teaching Fellowship, Leadership Development Fellowship and the Dean’s Choice Award for Study Abroad Innovation.