Sarah Hobbie

Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, College of Biological Sciences, 2023

Professor Sarah Hobbie is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor, Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, College of Biological Sciences, who began her position at the University of Minnesota in 1998. Her contributions to the University of Minnesota have fundamentally transformed the ecological research landscape at the University and in the Minnesota region. Her successful efforts to fund the infrastructure associated with this important long-term research program have created an architecture to sustain this work for decades to come. Hobbie is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (since 2013); a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 2017); and a fellow of the Ecological Society of America (elected 2015). She has over 220 peer-reviewed publications, over 44,000 citations, an h-index of 97, and regularly publishes in high impact journals such as Science, Nature, and PNAS. While at the University of Minnesota, Hobbie has received $49.3 million in external funding as either lead- or co-PI, from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency. 

The scope and scale of Hobbie’s scientific accomplishments are truly extraordinary, and her scholarly work has significantly shaped how we understand human impacts on ecosystems. Hobbie considers how human social, economic, and political layers shape ecological cycles, how these cycles interact, and what this means for the services that ecosystems provide. Her research has implications for conservation of biodiversity, climate change management, and equitable access to ecosystem services. Hobbie uses long-term experiments to tease apart the effects of human activities on ecosystem cycles; uses ecological frameworks to understand urban ecosystems and their impacts on human well-being; and has made critical contributions to the growing field of urban ecology. She has worked with a team of collaborators across seven US cities to document how human planting practices in cities are creating homogenization of biological communities and significant reductions in biodiversity. Ongoing work in this area considers the intersection of urban nature and socioeconomic status and how urban ecological restoration could reduce disparities in toxin exposure and well-being.

Much of Hobbie’s broad research success is supported by her skills as a mentor and collaborator. She is recognized widely as a critical and careful thinker, highly respected by her colleagues, and consistently asked to take on leadership roles within the ecosystem science community. Her colleagues approach her for advice and collaboration because they are familiar with the care, attention, and follow-through she brings to her work. Hobbie explicitly seeks to understand the research and professional goals of her students and postdocs, and works to connect them to resources and personal connections that support their specific goals. Hobbie is remarkably responsive with constructive and thoughtful feedback on experimental design, analyses, and manuscript preparation. Former students and mentees have noted that their successes in the field are directly attributable to Hobbie’s practice of supporting the development of critical skills in scientific research and the skills to successfully write about that research. 

Hobbie has been active in service at the University at the departmental, collegiate, and University level, serving on numerous committees, including as director of Graduate Admissions and director of Graduate Studies in the Ecology, Evolution and Behavior (EEB) Graduate Program; as EEB faculty liaison to the Writing Enriched Curriculum program; and as a member of former Provost Karen Hanson’s Grand Challenges Committee, tasked with reviewing 140 faculty idea submissions and synthesizing them into potential grand challenge themes. Locally, since 2021, Hobbie has led the Minneapolis-St. Paul Urban Long-term Ecological Research Program (MSP-LTER), a vision conceived in 2019 and brought into existence with a massive collaborative grant-writing effort. Nationally, Hobbie has provided editorial service to three journals, including the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics. She also served as a member of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) for two years before being appointed as chair of the ESA Fellows and Early Career Fellows Selection Committee. While chair, she led a complete overhaul of the selection process aimed at reducing implicit bias in the selection of fellows. In addition, Hobbie has contributed long-term service to the Leopold Leadership Program (now Earth Leadership Program), a leadership development program for mid-career faculty that equips academic researchers with the skills, approaches, and theoretical frameworks for catalyzing change to address the world’s most pressing sustainability challenges.