2023 Waterman Award

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has named Dr. William Anderegg as one of the three 2023 recipients of its Alan T. Waterman Award. This award is NSF's highest honor and recognizes an outstanding researcher who is 40 years or younger or not more than 10 years beyond receipt of the Ph.D. degree, by December 31 of the year of the nomination. In addition to a medal, the awardee receives a $1 million grant over five years to support scientific research or advanced study at the institution of the recipient's choice. Dr. William “Bill” Anderegg, Director of the Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy and Associate Professor, School of Biological Sciences at the University of Utah is recognized for his outstanding contributions to ecological and climate change research. His novel research uses a multi-disciplinary focus to address the greatest environmental challenges facing the U.S. and the world today. Dr. Anderegg’s landmark papers on aspen forests linked the risk of drought mortality with fundamental tree physiology, the threshold loss of vascular function. He showed how physiological and ecological components of forests, such as diversity of water-transport strategies, determine forest resilience to climate stresses. He led a multi-disciplinary team of distinguished researchers to provide a new framework for forest climate mitigation in 2020 and followed up with an unprecedented and comprehensive risk analysis for the Earth’s forests over the 21st century in 2022. His work advances the basic understanding of mechanisms driving plant sensitivity to drought, with clear links to widespread tree-mortality events of the last two decades across the Western U.S. (i.e., the “megadrought”). His work elucidates the importance of biodiversity to the sustainable functioning of forest ecosystems under water-limited conditions regionally and globally and is critical to advancing the understanding of climate change and developing sustainability practices for forest ecosystems. Throughout his scientific career, Dr. Anderegg has received numerous NSF awards, including an NSF CAREER grant in 2021. He was also a recipient of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship, the American Geophysical Union’s Global Environmental Change Early Career Award, and the New Phytologist Tansley Medal. Dr. Anderegg intimately integrates his research with undergraduate and graduate education, research mentorship and professional development. He has demonstrated a strong commitment to increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM through his active recruitment, teaching, and training of members of historically excluded groups. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.