Katharine Hogan ’13

Environmental Science

Biography

After finishing my BS in 2013 and MS in 2014, I worked seasonal research jobs in conservation and ecology in Washington State, Nevada, New Mexico, and Idaho before moving to Nebraska in 2016. I worked for a year and a half as a Hubbard Conservation Fellow with The Nature Conservancy. After the fellowship, I began PhD work at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln under a National Science Foundation fellowship. The work is focused on the resilience of agriculturally dominated ecosystems, specifically the Great Plains. I am in the last year of the PhD program, studying the responses of restored prairies to disturbances (fire, grazing, and drought), alternative restoration methods, and management. I plan to continue my career in the field of prairie restoration ecology, focusing on quantifying the effectiveness of restoration and scaling up restoration efforts in terms of spatial scale and interconnectedness between restoration professionals.

What were some of your most valuable experiences at Taylor?

My most valuable experiences at Taylor University were my study abroad semester in Ireland and my field natural history course in the Black Hills. As an environmental science student, I was a member of a small program working and learning with people of similar values who cared about the environment and conservation.

How did your classes or interactions with professors at Taylor impact your growth?

I was positively impacted by many of the classes I took for my BS and MS degrees, particularly the courses that involved learning multiple field science methods, fundamentals of ecology, and conservation science.

How can Taylor graduates use their unique Taylor education and its liberal arts foundational core as an asset in your discipline?

Use it to fight against the still unfortunately common idea that Christians do not need to care about the environment. I have met numerous people who are not Christians who are shocked when I tell them that a large percentage of Christians do not see the need to care about the environment. To people outside the faith, caring about the earth seems an extremely logical extent of the belief in a created universe. I would urge environmental students to be conscious of this disconnect and work against this fact, even if it means speaking up against majority beliefs.