January 2026 News

• On January 5th, Amoi Campbell was one of two Rice students who received the 2025 GSS Best Presentation Award, as chosen by a panel of EEB faculty. Their presentation, titled “In my Context Dependent Era: How Belowground Traits Outperform Aboveground Traits in an Invaded Grassland Community,” was noted as demonstrating “ability to engage a broad scientific audience while maintaining strong disciplinary depth, clear conceptual framing, and effective communication of research ideas, along with clear growth in both research development and presentation skills.”
• Saheed Jimoh co-authored two new publications focused on soil carbon in grassland ecosystems. The first, titled “Resistance of shallow soil carbon to both short-term isolated and recurrent droughts in two semi-arid grasslands,” was published in Oecologia on January 7th. The second, titled “The global extent of the grassland biome and implications for the terrestrial carbon sink,” was published in Nature Ecology & Evolution on January 27th. Publication links:     1      2 
• Brooke Beardshall, along with other first-year EEB students, hosted an outreach booth at Bunker Hill Elementary’s Science Night on January 27th. The booth was designed to show kids how broad science can be and what it might mean to be a scientist. They walked students through the full scientific process, from collecting data in the field to bringing samples back to the lab for processing and cleaning, then analyzing the data to make scientific inferences.