By Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs
As the University of Waterloo launches its annual National Postdoc Appreciation Week (NPAW), we celebrate three Waterloo postdoctoral scholars have been awarded the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship.
The Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships program provides funding to the very best postdoctoral applicants, both nationally and internationally, who will positively contribute to the country’s economic, social and research‑based growth.
Across Canada, 70 researchers will receive $70,000 for two years, with a total of $9.8 million awarded nationally.
“The Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships support transformative research that can advance our understanding of emergent fields and address global challenges,” says Dr. Jeff Casello, associate vice-president of graduate studies and postdoctoral affairs. “We are thrilled to welcome these new scholars to our community.”
The University of Waterloo attracts world-class postdoctoral scholars who transform and disrupt the status quo and we are always delighted to support them as they continue to pursue personal and professional goals that will have positive impacts on Canadian society’s future.
“We are excited to have these emerging scholars join the Faculty of Science,” says Dr. Chris Houser, dean of the Faculty of Science. “Their transformational research pushes the boundaries of knowledge and imagination from microbial reactions to distant galaxies, and I look forward to learning the outcomes of their research.”
Among this year’s Banting Fellowship recipients is Saraswati (Saru), an Ecohydrology Research Associate from the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.
Saraswati will work alongside Water Institute member Professor Philippe Van Cappellen on their research project titled “Will rewetting Canada’s degraded peatlands help mitigate climate warming?”. Many countries, including Canada, have proposed — and already implemented — the rewetting of drained peatlands as a Nature-based Solution (NbS) to curb climate warming caused by greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, whether this NbS is an effective climate change mitigation strategy remains controversial.
Saraswati (Saru), Ecohydrology Research Associate, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Water Institute Postdoc Network Executive Member.
Only a small number of field-based GHG flux studies have clearly shown a reduction of carbon dioxide emissions from rewetted peatlands, while at the same time, providing evidence for increasing methane emissions.
“The latter is worrisome because methane has a much higher radiative forcing efficiency than carbon dioxide. Emissions of GHGs from peatlands are intimately linked to the turnover of organic carbon by the resident soil microbial communities,” Saraswati says.
This is why a quantitative understanding of the complex, microbially mediated reaction network underlying soil organic matter (SOM) decomposition is central to explaining the response of carbon dioxide and methane emissions from peatlands to rewetting. The functioning of this reaction network depends on the energetics of the various chemical transformation pathways involved, for example, how much energy is consumed or released as a given reaction proceeds.
Saraswati’s research will use microcalorimetry to directly measure the energetic yields of reaction pathways that produce carbon dioxide and methane during SOM decomposition. A key outcome of this research will be microcalorimetric assays to quantitatively assess the degradability of SOM that will be used as input to a novel, bioenergetics-informed reaction network model of SOM decomposition.
The latter will then replace the current oversimplistic SOM reaction module in the Canadian Model for Peatlands, used for Canada’s national greenhouse gas reporting and prediction.