Meet Serita Frey
Dr. Serita Frey has over 30 years of experience studying microbes in the environment as a microbial ecologist. She received her PhD in Ecology from Colorado Statue University and is a professor at the University of New Hampshire in the Department of Natural Resources and the environmental science program. This year, Dr. Frey was elected as an ESA Fellow.
Dr. Frey’s research studies how environmental change is altering ecosystems with emphasis on soil microbial communities and nutrient cycling processes. More specifically, she is interested in how anthropogenic stressors (i.e climate change, invasive species, nitrogen disposition) affect composition and diversity of soil microbial communities and microbial-mediate carbon and nitrogen cycles.
Her research team maintains five long-term global change experiments at the Harvard Forest Long-term Ecological Research (LTER) site and a state-wide, distributed soil sensor network in New Hampshire. She works with modelers to link across scales from genomes to the globe by incorporating microbial genomic, physiological, community, and ecosystem-scale processes into Earth system models.
Dr. Frey is editor-in-chief for Issues in Ecology and is on the Board of Editors for Ecology and Ecological Monographs. She served as chair of the Science, Technology, and Education Advisory Committee (STEAC) for the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON; 2016-2018). Awards include the Pettingill Endowed Lectureship in Natural History (University of Michigan Biological Station), the Distinguished Ecologist Alumna (Colorado State University), Associate Professor of the Year (UNH), a Bullard Fellowship (Harvard University), and a National Science Foundation Early Career Development Award.
When asked about what her favorite things were about being part of ESA, Dr. Frey responded, “Being part of a dynamic community of ecologists all aiming to understand complex natural and human-dominated ecosystems, to educate the next generation of ecologists, and to work with stakeholders to use ecologically-informed information in decision making.”