User:Factsnfigurestoo/sandbox/Patricia A. Soranno

Patricia A. Soranno is an American ecologist and Professor at Michigan State University, and a core faculty member in the Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior Program. She served as Division Director in the Biological Sciences Directorate at the National Science Foundation from 2019-2023. Sorano's research has helped define and document the conceptual roots of landscape limnology and macrosystems ecology.

Education

Soranno received her B.S. degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Notre Dame. While a student in college, she conducted research under the direction of Stephen Carpenter, spending five summers on whole-lake experimental studies of trophic cascades at the University of Notre Dame Environmental Research Center. After graduating, Soranno worked for 2 years as a laboratory technician in Carpenter’s lab before moving to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she obtained her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Oceanography and Limnology. Her dissertation focused on watershed and lake nutrient dynamics in Lake Mendota. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin's Trout Lake Field Station, where she began her cross-biome studies to understand the role of spatial variation in ecosystem processes.

Career

Soranno joined the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Michigan State University in 1996 as an Assistant Professor, later becoming an Associate and then a full Professor. In 2015, she was selected as the Editor-in-Chief to launch Limnology and Oceanography Letters, a new open-access journal for the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography. As of 2024, that journal was ranked 1st in limnology and 2nd in oceanography, based on journal impact factor. When launching that journal, Soranno also created the Raelyn Cole Publishing Fellowship Program, which provides opportunities for early-career scientists to be actively engaged at all levels of publishing, and which serves as a model for other journals and academic societies.

In 2019, Soranno took leave from her faculty position and stepped down as journal editor to become Division Director of the Division of Biological Infrastructure at the National Science Foundation. That division's programs focus on cutting-edge infrastructure that supports biological research including scientists, technology, centers, and facilities such as the National Ecological Observatory Network. Soranno helped to launch several programs focused on broadening participation in the biological sciences, and building research capacity at less research-intensive institutions. She returned to MSU and joined the Department of Integrative Biology as Professor in 2023. In 2024, she became a Senior Fellow for Research Infrastructure in MSU’s Office of Research & Innovation.

Research

IN PROGRESS -- Soranno and her long-time collaborator, Kendra S. Cheruvelil have led multiple research teams to create LAGOS, an open-access research platform to advance the study, understanding, and management of lakes at regional to continental scales. The research platform provides a blueprint for building large, multi-thematic, and interoperable datasets at macroscales, including those for studying lake productivity and nutrients within 17 US states (LAGOS-NE) and all 48 conterminous US states (LAGOS-US). The research platform is being used by researchers who have not been involved in its development for a range of research questions on macroscale lake ecology.

In addition, Soranno has published on the needed practices and guidelines necessary to conduct macrosystems ecology research, such as team science and open science, including arguing for increased data sharing in environmental science, and how they both contribute to big data research in ecology. Soranno has used these practices and approaches in her research in which she has led or been a part of large interdisciplinary research teams to conduct macroscale research on freshwater systems with a focus on quantifying variation at macroscales and its relationship to regional and local variation

Soranno’s research has documented how global changes such as land use and climate change will influence freshwater productivity and water quality across US lakes. More recently, she and her collaborators have expanded the scope of their macrosystems ecology research to include environmental equity and justice to examine the interplay between natural and social systems by centering the basic human right of environmental equity and access as recently adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2022.

Honors and awards

In recognition of her interdisciplinary work, Soranno and collaborators received the Excellence Award in Interdisciplinary Scholarship from the MSU Chapter of the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi in 2015. She received MSU’s William J. Beal Outstanding Faculty Award in 2016 for her outstanding research innovations and effective and strong teaching and departmental governance leadership. Nationally, she has been recognized as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2019 and as a fellow in her two primary disciplinary professional organizations—in 2020, she was selected as an Ecological Society of America (ESA) Fellow and in 2018, she was selected as an Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) Sustaining Fellow. In addition, while serving at the National Science Foundation, Soranno received an NSF Director’s Superior Accomplishment Award for her contributions to launching new programs that broaden participation in the biological sciences. She has recently been invited to serve as one of the chapter leads for the US’s first National Nature Assessment to be published in 2026.

External links

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