Thank you to everyone who has made our fourth annual Early Career Award possible! It was an amazing pool of applicants, and thanks to proceeds from the fisHER Adventure Classic, we were able to support two awards this year! Learn more about our winners (Samantha Dowiarz and Jordan Hartman) and how they will use the awards below. If you are interested in supporting our initiatives and awards like this, consider a one-time or recurring monthly donation to Women of Fisheries (see our sponsorship page for details).
Congratulations to Samantha Dowiarz
“Almost every year during my childhood, my family would travel to Ft. Lauderdale, FL for a beach vacation. I was practically glued to the water, snorkeling for hours on end and never wanting to leave. I was captivated by the marine life—fish and invertebrates that most beachgoers never notice. Even though I returned to the resort with a sunburned back, my gleaming smile and extensive shell collection made it all worthwhile. These trips made me fall in love with marine biology, more specifically fisheries science,” said Samantha.
Although she was raised in Chicago, she attended the University of Miami, earning a BS in Marine Science and Biology. A pivotal experience during Samantha’s undergraduate career was the opportunity to study abroad in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador. She became immersed in their culture and gained invaluable experience in field sampling. Her passion for field work blossomed after her three-month hiatus from North America and became a defining factor in her career.
After assisting several graduate students with research projects while earning her bachelor’s degree, Samantha decided to focus her academic career on fisheries research and pursue an MS in Biology at East Carolina University. Her research, which explored the age and spawning structure of Hickory Shad, utilized both traditional and innovative methodologies to examine these aspects of their life history. Upon earning her MS in 2021, she started work at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science as a Research Specialist in the Juvenile Recruitment Surveys Program. In this role, she has been able to blend fieldwork with lab research and has started to take on more leadership responsibilities by coordinating field data collection for multiple projects. Her current goal is to further develop her research and leadership skills as a juvenile fish ecologist, advancing both her expertise and impact in the field.
Samantha will use the award to cover fees associated with attending the American Fisheries Society (AFS) Tidewater Chapter Annual Meeting in Morehead City, NC.
Congratulations to Jordan Hartman
Jordan Hartman is a freshwater conservation geneticist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. One of her primary research goals is to explore the ways in which environmental change and anthropogenic pressures influence genetic diversity in freshwater fishes. By integrating genomic data with spatial analyses, she aims to develop a landscape genomic framework that can elucidate the mechanisms driving population structure and gene flow. In particular, she investigates how these genomic tools can be harnessed to inform conservation strategies for native and invasive fish species. Jordan first became interested in biology after visiting the zoo in the 2nd grade and seeing the penguin exhibit. Her earliest career dream was to be a marine biologist, but growing up in the Midwest, she learned to see the beauty in freshwater ecosystems. “I think a lot of people feel like I did, that you need to be on a coast to see the magic of aquatic life, but I now have the tools to share my passion for fisheries, wetlands, and aquatic systems with my community and the next generation of scientists and policymakers,” Jordan said.
Jordan prides herself on being a holistic scientist, equally comfortable in the field and the lab, and enthusiastic in analyses and writing. Her career experiences have led to the navigation of the entire scientific process, from grant writing, sample collection, advanced data analysis, and summarizing my results for reports, scientific articles, and public-facing communications. During her time as a technician, project manager, and student, she has utilized a wide variety of methods, instrumentation, and data to conduct relevant research and inform conservation management decisions. Her experiences range from conducting field sampling for fish using radio telemetry in Montana, kayaking and snorkeling for freshwater mussels in Missouri, seining the beaches of Lake Michigan for Banded Killifish, and performing genetic and genomic population studies on Little Brown Bats using bioinformatic pipelines. As a project manager, she helped plan and lead fieldwork in Fort Polk, Louisiana and analyzed and reported on the environmental DNA data to guide management decisions for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and the United States Department of Defense. As a student, she had the opportunity to work through the entire scientific process—she collected samples in challenging field environments, managed undergraduate technicians and taught them complex methods, mastered cutting-edge genomic techniques, and honed her ability to be efficient and curious in the lab.
As a postdoctoral researcher, Jordan was invited to give seminars in Hanoi and Can Tho, Vietnam to discuss the use of genomic tools in aquatic conservation genetics. “This experience was by far the most influential to my career – the trip included some of the greatest moments of my life,” Jordan said. She was able to collaborate with international scientists with the same freshwater conservation interests as herself. They saw real-world consequences of climate change in the Mekong Delta and discussed these impacts on freshwater ecosystems with scientists and community members. “I will never forget these experiences and their profound impacts on how I view freshwater fish conservation,” she said.
Jordan also runs a small business with the mission of creating stickers at the intersection of science, nature, and art so most of her stickers are science, nature, and positive mental health themed. She is passionate about depicting lesser-known animals as stickers to simply raise awareness of their existence – for example, she has multiple freshwater mussel and fish stickers, a Hellbender sticker, and a crayfish sticker.
Jordan will use the award to cover fees associated with attending the American Fisheries Society Annual Meeting in San Antonio, TX where she plans to present research conducted on native Illinois lamprey species.