Doll Honored with Sea Grant Outstanding Outreach Award

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Jack Thigpen, 919-515-3012, jack_thigpen@ncsu.edu

Posted Friday, May 6, 2016

Barbara Doll has been honored with the Sea Grant Mid-Atlantic region’s Outstanding Outreach Award. Tom Murray, chair of the national Assembly of Sea Grant Extension Program Leaders, presented Doll with the award on April 27 at the regional meeting in Red Bank, New Jersey.

Doll, a water protection and restoration specialist with North Carolina Sea Grant, was recognized for using online video as a tool to explain her research applying urban stream restoration methods in agricultural areas. The video also helped her earn an Outstanding Faculty Research Award from NC State University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

“I am really honored to receive this award from our peers. The video offered a great challenge to be creative in telling the story of existing research needs, as well as the way we document how new technologies work in different situations,” Doll notes.

Jack Thigpen, extension director for North Carolina Sea Grant, is also pleased. “This project exemplifies Barbara’s commitment to innovative and rigorous academic research — as well as her ability to apply that new knowledge to positively affect coastal ecosystems.”

Doll now will compete against the other regional winners for the national outreach program award, to be presented by the Assembly of Sea Grant Extension Program Leaders at Sea Grant Week 2016 this fall.

In her more than two decades with Sea Grant, Doll has secured over $7 million in external funding for stream restoration demonstrations and related projects. She led the three-phase restoration of Rocky Branch, a tributary of the Neuse River running through the campus of NC State University. She also is recognized for working closely with industry and agency professionals, and for providing students with hands-on experience monitoring and evaluating the aquatic health and stability of streams.

“It has been great to connect with engineers and others in ecological restoration to advance the science and practice.  After all this time, I am still having fun,” Doll says.  “I also enjoy working with former students who are advancing in their careers.”

She holds a doctorate degree in biological and agricultural engineering from NC State University, where she has a joint appointment with the Biological and Agricultural Engineering Department as an assistant extension professor. There she teaches courses and conducts research related to fluvial geomorphology and ecological restoration.

As part of her dissertation, Doll designed two studies on stream restoration effectiveness recently published in the journal Water.  In one — Can Rapid Assessments Predict the Biotic Condition of Restored Streams? — Doll shows a path to predict what is living in the restored stream.

In the other — Identifying Watershed, Landscape, and Engineering Design Factors that Influence the Biotic Condition of Restored Streams — she concludes that expanding a floodplain will improve the habitat for the restored stream.

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