Guest Post: Why You Should Nominate for Awards

Guest post by ESA Awards Chair Nate Sanders

Do you know that feeling when one of your graduate students gets their first paper published? When a postdoc in your lab lands the job of their dreams? When a policy you’ve been working on finally gets implemented, and you can see it’s having positive effects on an environmental issue? Doesn’t that feel good?

You know what else feels good? Nominating a colleague, collaborator, student, mentor, or friend for an ESA Award and seeing them win it!

For a few years, I was chair of the ESA Fellows and Early Career Fellows Subcommittee and got to email folks to let them know they’d been selected. Folks were so honored and excited to know that their peers recognized all of the hard work they’d been doing — the cool research, teaching, outreach, policy development, and management that they’d devoted so much energy to. Reading their responses about how overjoyed they were at being selected was truly one of the highlights of the year for me.

And you can have that feeling too! Nominate someone for one of the many awards ESA offers! We’ve tried to make it easy and straightforward to nominate someone, now allowing their direct collaboration in the process.

Awards build recognition and can open up exciting new career opportunities, especially for scientists traditionally underrepresented in our field. And we know that there are SO MANY ecologists out there who deserve recognition and celebration. So, take a few minutes (okay, maybe an hour …) and figure out who within your vast networks you’d like to nominate, and then start your nomination!