Alyssa M. Willson

Alyssa M. Willson

she/her

Quantitative ecologist
PhD Candidate
McLachlan Lab

Teaching

Mentoring

As a graduate student, I have priortized mentoring undergraduate students both at the University of Notre Dame and at collaborating institutions. I believe that mentoring is one of the most important aspects of being an academic because of the direct impact that mentorship has on students. My advising philosophy centers the student, such that I support students through research to reach their career goals. This begins by identifying overlap between my research interests and the student’s research interests or career goals, and continues as students learn and apply quantitative skills and scientific theory. I firmly believe that all students are capable of conducting quantitative research, which is reflected in the breadth of students whom I have advised, ranging from students studying applied mathematics to students studying environmental science with no computational background.

Through the Ecological Forecasting Initiative, I have mentored seven students over two years from California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. The objective of this cross-institutional program was to introduce undergraduate students within the Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation program to methods in ecological forecasting. Six students spent a semester-long internship learning conceptually about the methods and theory of ecological forecasting via a series of open access educational resources. Two of those students continued their ecological forecasting education as summer researchers, where they each developed ecological forecasts of lake and stream temperature and dissolved oxygen, which they successfully submitted to the NEON Ecological Forecasting Challenge and are now co-authors on a publication about the Forecasting Challenge. Another student investigated the representation of self-reinforcing vegetation feedbacks in forest ecosystem process models and presented his findings at the Geoscience Alliance conference.

At Notre Dame, I have advised two students on independent research projects over the course of several years in the McLachlan lab. Hayden Gallo, a former undergraduate student in the Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics department and current graduate student at the University of Massachussetts Chan Medical School, applied to work with me to apply his statistical background to specific scientific research. Based on his interests, he first worked on my project assessing the accessibility and availability of resources for learning ecological forecasting by contributing to statistical analyses in the project. As a result, he is the second author on my publication related to ecological forecasting education. Hayden then went on to impelment an extensive sensitivity analysis of the parameters in the forest gap model LINKAGES for a summer indendent research project. Here, he was given more independence to research and apply innovative statistical techniques to understand sensitivity of aboveground biomass predictions from LINKAGES to parameterization and climate driver uncertainty.

Ian Shuman, an undergraduate biology major, worked with me to quantify the relationship between vegetation occurrences and environmental covariates across Illinois and Indiana prior to widespread European settlement. Ian came to me with extensive knowledge of the historical occurrence data, as well as foundational understanding of drivers of large-scale vegetation distributions. Based on his background and interests, I focused on supplying Ian with the computational tools required to address his research questions. Ian is now a graduate student at Columbia University and his research is in preparation to be submitted to Ecography in 2024.

Classroom teaching

I have three semesters of experience as a teaching assistant at Notre Dame, as well as a background in inclusive pedagogy.

Teaching assistantships

Inclusive pedagogy experience