SFS Fellows Program
The Fellows of the Society of Freshwater Science are selected based on sustained excellence in contributions to freshwater science research, policy, or management. These are the leaders, at national and international levels, of their areas of freshwater science.
2024 Fellows:
Bob Hall
Dr. Robert Hall is Distinguished Professor of Limnology at Flathead Lake Biological Station, University of Montana, where he has worked since 2017. Prior to that he was on the faculty at University of Wyoming where he started in 1998. Since graduate school at University of Georgia he has been interested in stream carbon and nitrogen cycling and food webs, but with a career trajectory of studying ever larger rivers. Current work links geomorphology to stream metabolism and nitrogen cycling, time-series analyses of river metabolism, food webs, isotope tracers, statistical modeling, and dissolved organic and inorganic carbon dynamics in rivers. Teaching includes a field based summer course on stream ecology taught on the Middle Fork Flathead, and graduate course on ecological models and data.
Bill McDowell
Dr. William H. McDowell is a Professor Emeritus of Environmental Science and Research Professor in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, New Hampshire, USA. He is also a Research Professor at Florida International University. He began his research career working on stream ecosystems with Dr. Stuart Fisher at Amherst College, where he received a B.A. in Biology. Dr. McDowell received a Ph.D. in Aquatic Ecology from Cornell University, working on dissolved organic matter dynamics in the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest with Dr. Gene Likens. He has worked on the biogeochemistry of land-water interactions in New Hampshire, Czech, Siberian, and Puerto Rican streams. He initiated ongoing long-term research at two sites, the tropical Luquillo Mountains of Puerto Rico and the suburban Lamprey River of New Hampshire. His research focus has been on understanding the fundamental interactions between nutrients and dissolved organic matter, and the ways in which land use, soils, hydrologic flow paths, and extreme events affect a wide range of ecological processes in inland waters. He has addressed the importance of inland waters to continental and global scale biogeochemistry with colleagues in many continental-scale collaborations such as the LINX projects.