Jessica Hellmann, assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Notre Dame, has been awarded a 2006 Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, which administers the program funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The award is granted to 20 individuals each year from applications across science, social science, and humanities. It is designed to assist talented junior faculty to pursue scholarly research and writing during the fellowship year.
Hellmann is studying the diversity of ways in which local and regional climatic effects are altering population dynamics. She uses butterflies to understand the effects of climate change on nature. Because detailed climate study in every ecological system would be a daunting task, her research compares two butterfly species in westernNorth Americawith the goal of predicting climatic impacts on endangered, vulnerable and culturally valued species.
A member of the Notre Dame faculty since 2003, Hellmann earned her doctorate fromStanfordUniversityand completed postdoctoral research there and at theUniversityofBritish Columbia.
Founded in 1945, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation is an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to the encouragement of excellence in education through the identification of critical needs and the development of effective national programs to address them.
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