Cayelan Carey awarded faculty fellowship
Cayelan Carey, professor of biological sciences in the College of Science, has been awarded the Patricia Caldwell Faculty Fellowship by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors.
The Patricia Caldwell Faculty Fellowship was established in 2019 with a generous gift from its namesake to advance the national and international prominence of the College of Science. A 1971 graduate with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, Caldwell created this fellowship to recognize faculty engaged in exceptional research and teaching, to recruit accomplished scholars, and to retain high-performing faculty members who make significant contributions to the university’s research missions.
A member of the Virginia Tech community since 2013, Carey was promoted to full professor in 2022. She has published more than 130 peer-reviewed articles, attracted over $19.6 million in funding, graduated seven doctoral students, and mentored six postdoctoral researchers.
Carey’s primary research addresses an increasingly serious environmental and public health challenge – predicting and controlling nuisance and harmful blooms of algae in lakes and reservoirs. This work has grown into an effort to develop broader freshwater ecosystem forecasting tools.
Carey has organized and led workshops on ecological forecasting for groups from the local to the international scale and for undergraduates through faculty participants. This work contributed to her role in formulating and becoming co-director of the newly established Center for Ecosystem Forecasting at Virginia Tech.
Carey’s honors include the Yentsch-Schindler Early Career Award from the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, the Kilham Memorial Award from the International Society of Limnology, a Fulbright Fellowship, and appointment as a Robert and Maude Gledden Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of Western Australia.
Carey received her bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. from Cornell University. She served as postdoctoral associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Center for Limnology.
