Dear CQS colleagues,

I am pleased to announce that Associate Professor Beth Gardner has agreed to serve as the Director of the Center for Quantitative Sciences (CQS), effective July 1, 2021. In this role she will be responsible for the programmatic and financial health of the Center, which includes the graduate degree program Quantitative Ecology and Resource Management (QERM) and the curricular program Quantitative Science (QSCI), which offers both undergraduate and graduate courses as well as an undergraduate minor.

I also want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who participated in the search process: the outgoing Director and participating unit Directors for working hard to find outstanding candidates to stand for the position; the search committee for their work in vetting the candidates; and the CQS community – faculty and students – for coming together to consider candidates and provide feedback following candidate Zoom interviews.

Beth Gardner is an Associate Professor at the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences and she runs the Quantitative Ecology Lab, which develops innovative methods to study wildlife, plant, and fisheries populations around the world. She is specifically interested in developing models and methods to estimate demographic rates, distributional patterns, and habitat relationships for wildlife populations — including spatial capture recapture models and hierarchical models for distance sampling and occupancy. Beth has taught QSCI courses since arriving at UW in 2016 and has mentored QERM graduate students. Her work and teaching are driven by an underlying interest in helping to improve quantitative approaches in ecology and to provide valuable information for decision making for conservation and management.

Beth succeeds Tim Essington, who will be returning to his full-time appointment as a professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences after a well-deserved sabbatical in AY21-22. I am incredibly grateful for Tim’s service to CQS and the College. During his tenure as Director, Tim worked to reform the QSCI curriculum, brought QERM into the college, negotiated support for QSCI TAs from the eScience Institute Data Science minor, and reconstituted both of these programs under the Center for Quantitative Science.

Please join me in welcoming Beth in her new role and in thanking Tim for his service.

Best,

Lisa J. Graumlich

She/her/hers
Mary Laird Professor and Dean
College of the Environment
University of Washington