William A. Hopkins awarded Thomas H. Jones Professorship

William A. Hopkins, professor of fish and wildlife conservation in the College of Natural Resources and Environment at Virginia Tech, has been awarded the Thomas H. Jones Professorship by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors.

The Thomas H. Jones Professorship in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation was established through the generosity of Thomas H. Jones ’49 to support the advancement of fish and wildlife sciences and to honor the faculty and students who lead the future of the field. Recipients exhibit recognized strengths in teaching and mentoring students and engage in research and outreach activities in fish and wildlife conservation that reflect the highest standard of excellence.

A member of the Virginia Tech community since 2005, Hopkins has broken new ground in several major areas of study, including unveiling the environmental health risks associated with open surface impoundments for solid waste disposal, pioneering research that revealed how these ponds attract biodiversity while adversely affecting their health and reproduction.

His cutting-edge work on how global climatic variation and habitat degradation affect the microclimate of bird and reptile nests opened an entirely new field of study, now expanding across North America, Europe, and Australia.

Closer to home, his team recently solved a 50-year conservation mystery regarding the enigmatic declines of the giant hellbender salamander, an accomplishment requiring more than 18 years of continuous study and demonstrating his extraordinary persistence and vision.

Hopkins has contributed to more than 200 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters and has been cited nearly 12,000 times with an h-index of 59, which places him among the leading scientists in fish and wildlife conservation nationally.

His contributions have been recognized with the 2015 Virginia Tech Alumni Award for Excellence in Research, the 2021 College of Natural Resources and Environment Research Achievement Award, and his 2025 election as a fellow of the Virginia Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. He has also been selected to serve on seven expert committees of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, two of which he chaired, a rare accomplishment for scientists from any discipline.

Beyond his laboratory, Hopkins is founding director of both the Interfaces of Global Change Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Program and the Global Change Center. These programs enroll and engage hundreds of faculty and students across the university, serve as models for interdisciplinary collaboration, and have helped recruit world-class talent to Virginia Tech.

Hopkins consistently receives some of the highest teaching evaluations in the college, and his courses are known for their rigor and their transformative experiential learning approaches. He has co-led study abroad programs in the Amazon rainforest and the Galápagos Islands, which students consistently identify as being a life-changing educational experience.

He developed a mentoring model that integrates undergraduates into meaningful research while training graduate students and postdocs to become effective mentors. This model has been adopted by colleagues nationally. His contributions to mentoring have been recognized with the CNRE Outstanding Graduate Student Mentor Award from the Graduate School in 2017 as well as multiple departmental teaching and mentorship awards.

As the cumulative result of his contributions to research, teaching, mentorship, and outreach, Hopkins was awarded the 2021 Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, the highest honor bestowed on faculty members in the commonwealth.

He earned his bachelor’s degree from Mercer University, his master’s degree from Auburn University, and his doctorate from the University of South Carolina.