Graduate School Spotlight: Liz Smith

At the Graduate School, we love to shine a spotlight on the outstanding achievements of our faculty and students. Liz Smith, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Environmental and Natural Resource Economics (ENRE), is a perfect example of a student who deserves such recognition. Liz has been an asset to URI and the coastal environmental community from the first day that she stepped on campus, involving herself in many aspects of both.

From the number of different classes that she has taught to the committees that have benefited from her membership, she has consistently given her time and attention. Over her years at URI, Liz has been a guest lecturer and taught classes at both the undergraduate and graduate level covering topics such as Introduction to Environment & Resource Economics, Resource Management & Conservation and Math for Economists.

Liz has been a member of several important Graduate School committees that ensure positive changes to graduate education at URI including the Graduate Curriculum Committee, the Graduate Council and the Graduate School Dean Search Committee. She has also been a co-writer of the Graduate Manual Revision Committee and served as the Treasurer for the Graduate Student Association, working to create a better educational experience for all graduate students. ENRE has been very fortunate to have her as their Graduate Representative and part of their Search Committee for new faculty, both positions where her influence has shaped the department for the benefit of current and future students. Also, while at URI, she served as a member of the Coastal Society and the Scientific Support of Environmental Emergency Response (SSEER), both of which work towards better understanding, management and preservation of coastal environmental resources.

Her commitment to the environment and focus on finding innovative conservation solutions to ongoing environmental issues is evident in her research. In her field work, conducted on the eastern shore of Virginia in conjunction with her major professor Dr. Stephen Swallow, she focused on alternative markets and mechanisms to help provide public goods, such as seagrass and migratory bird habitat restoration. She has also done work in the URI Policy Lab, integrating experimental economics into her research, trying to understand how people respond to incentive mechanisms and what types of policy impacts may result.

To her credit, Liz has been repeatedly awarded both internal and external funding based upon her commitment to the environment and her research. In her time at URI, she has accepted three fellowships, all awarded competitively. She was a Marine Resource Economics Fellow in 2007-2009, a 2009-2010 Graduate Fellow and she received the Sevielleta Summer Graduate Fellowship (2010) as part of her ongoing work with the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Her grants include a URI Enhancement of Graduate Research and Scholarship mini-grant from the URI Graduate School for her work with Incentive Mechanisms and the Provision of Public Goods - Testing Alternative Frameworks for Experimental Auctions to Supply Ecosystem Services. She has also been repeatedly awarded grants from NSF as a Co-Principal Investigator with Dr. Swallow for her dissertation work conducted at the Virginia Coastal Reserve Long-Term Ecological Research site.

Even in the face of such overwhelming proof of her personal achievements, Liz credits the ENRE program as being a part of her success. She feels that ENRE is a special program where students and faculty share a personal as well as a professional relationship, mentioning that they frequently spend time together outside of the labs and classrooms at gatherings ranging from potlucks and pumpkin carving to group paddles and road races. According to Liz, the camaraderie within the department "makes ENRE a unique place to learn and work," which certainly made her journey through the PhD program much easier. Her experience with ENRE was so rewarding that she said, "There's no other place I would rather have spent the last five plus years."

Though it is evident that the ENRE and URI communities hold a special place in her heart, Liz will be moving on in the summer. Liz is in her last year of graduate studies and though URI will miss her invaluable contributions, we wish her the best and brightest of things to come. We know that she will be a successful and integral member of whatever team is lucky enough to have her.