DkIT Researcher is Elected Co-Chair of Global Ecological Network

Sofia la Fuente, a postgraduate researcher in the Centre for Freshwater and Environmental Studies in Dundalk Institute of Technology (DkIT) was honoured to be selected as the new Co-Chair Elect for the GLEON Graduate Student Association (GSA) at their annual meeting in New York in November 2022. GLEON (the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network, www.gleon.org) is a grassroots network of scientists that conducts innovative science by sharing and interpreting high-resolution sensor data from automated lake monitoring stations.

Sofia, who is from Bolivia and has been in Ireland since 2019, will assist the current co-chairs of the GSA over the next two years, and then will assume her role as GSA chair in November 2023. The GSA brings together students from across the world and informs, trains, and mentors those students, enabling the next generation of scientists to participate in international and interdisciplinary network science. Sofia's own research is focused on the effects of climate change on evaporation from lakes at a global scale. She is co-supervised by Prof. Eleanor Jennings of DkIT and Dr Iestyn Woolway of University of Bangor (Wales, UK) and has just had her first peer-reviewed paper published in Journal of Hydrology on 'Multi-model projections of future evaporation in a sub-tropical lake'.