Graduate student Richard Vachula was granted the Outstanding Student Paper Award at the December 2016 meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Vachula received the award after presenting his paper, A comprehensive reconstruction of Alaskan Arctic fire history over the last 30,000 years as inferred from a novel multi-proxy suite of organic geochemical and paleoecological methodology, in collaboration with IBES fellows Yongsong Huang and James Russell.

Vachula's work is currently supported by an IBES Graduate Fellowship.