Rate My Professor Erinn Seybold

Erin Seybold is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geology at the University of Kansas, a position she has held since 2024, and an Assistant Scientist at the Kansas Geological Survey since 2019. Prior to these roles, she served as a Postdoctoral Associate at Vermont EPSCoR, University of Vermont, from 2017 to 2019. She earned a B.A. in Biology and Environmental Science from St. Olaf College in 2011 and a Ph.D. in Ecology from Duke University in 2017. Seybold's research integrates watershed hydrology, ecosystem ecology, and biogeochemistry to elucidate how watersheds and river networks transport, modify, and store nutrients and carbon. Her work examines the effects of human activities, such as land use change, climate change, urbanization, and agricultural adaptation, on water quality, quantity, and freshwater ecosystem health, particularly in Kansas and broader contexts. Key research themes include intermittent streams, water resources and climate change impacts in the Great Plains, critical zone resiliency to environmental disturbances, and coastal hydro-biogeochemistry. As principal investigator, she leads the Kansas Groundwater Quality Research & Monitoring Network, funded at $2,000,459 in 2024 for a five-year project. She is co-principal investigator on significant grants including NSF EPSCoR Aquatic Intermittency effects on Microbiomes in Streams (AIMS, $6 million to KU, 2020), Building Emerging STEM Scholars of Tomorrow (BESST, $999,835, 2022), and USGS Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesis on hydroclimatic-ecosystem asynchrony (2024).

Seybold has authored influential publications, including "Control points in ecosystems: Moving beyond the hot spot hot moment concept" (Ecosystems, 2017, cited 470 times), "Land use and season influence event-scale nitrate and soluble reactive phosphorus exports and export stoichiometry from headwater catchments" (Water Resources Research, 2020, cited 83 times), "Winter runoff events pose an unquantified continental-scale risk of high wintertime nutrient export" (Environmental Research Letters, 2022, cited 50 times), and "How Low Can You Go? Widespread Challenges in measuring low stream discharge and a path forward" (Limnology and Oceanography Letters, 2023). Her work has amassed over 1,056 citations on Google Scholar, demonstrating substantial impact in aquatic biogeochemistry and hydrology. She has received prestigious awards such as the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2013-2017), NSF-USGS Graduate Research Internship Program Fellowship (2016-2017), Fulbright Scholar (2011), and Goldwater Scholar (2010). Seybold actively contributes through leadership as Co-Chair of the Non-perennial Ecosystems Chapter of the Society for Freshwater Science, Topic Editor for a special issue in Frontiers in Water, NSF proposal reviewer and panelist, and session convener at AGU meetings. She has delivered invited public lectures and seminars at institutions including the University of Kansas Department of Geology (2023), University of New Hampshire (2023), Penn State (2023), and USGS Kansas Water Science Center (2023).