Rachel Schaefer, PhD ’24 was selected as the winner of the 2024 Lorenz G. Straub Award for her dissertation entitled, “Exploring connections between seagrass ecosystem services and meadow hydrodynamics.”

Schaefer’s thesis explored a range of physical scales to describe how seagrass provides coastal protection and facilitates blue carbon. Conventional belief held that seagrass meadows act as natural shock absorbers by slowing down waves and currents to trap sediment in the seafloor, which in turn stores carbon over time. Schaefer’s work was groundbreaking in that it revealed a more complex reality, in which a seagrass meadow’s geometry and shoot density can limit the accretion of sediment and carbon, either by limiting the supply of sediment to the center of the meadow or by the supporting a continual migration of patches, which promotes erosion and removal of carbon. Her work was most recently featured in Nature Communications – Earth and Environment.

Schaefer received her bachelor’s in civil engineering from the University of Delaware and PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2024 under the advisement of Heidi Nepf, the Donald and Martha Harleman Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering.  She’s currently a research engineer at Verisk.

Established under the Lorenz G. Straub Memorial Fund in the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory at the University of Minnesota, the annual award is bestowed to the most meritorious thesis in hydraulic engineering, ecohydraulics, or related fields. Recipients are presented with a Straub Award medal and a monetary gift at a spring awards ceremony. The year of the award corresponds to the completion of the dissertation. More information about the Lorenz G. Straub Award can be found at https://cse.umn.edu/safl/lorenz-g-straub-award