Biology Professor Sam Fey Wins Swanson Promise Award

The award honors junior faculty members who display exceptional potential.

Prof. Sam Fey [biology] is a recipient of the Swanson Promise Award, becoming the fifth Reed faculty member to receive the award in eight years.

“I’m happy to accept this award, but I really see it as being for work that’s done by all the folks in my lab,” says Fey.

The award is bestowed by the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust on promising junior faculty members. Previous Reed professors who have been selected include Prof. Kelly Chacón [chemistry] (2023), Prof. Anna Ritz [biology] (2020), Prof. Alison Crocker [physics] (2019), and Prof. Sarah Schaack [biology] (2016)

“It’s not an accident that Reed gets this kind of recognition,” Fey says. “It’s a great environment to learn about how to do science in the classroom; it’s a great environment to learn how to do science in a more informal, hands-on way during the summer months. I hope that keeps happening.”

As an ecologist, Fey studies how population and community dynamics are shaped by environmental variation. “In ecology, there’s been a lot of focus on how big drivers of environmental change affect organisms,” he says. “The contribution of my lab has been to focus explicitly on the change in the environment—even environmental change over a single day.”

Fey, who works under the watchful eye of his stoic wheaten terrier/poodle hybrid, Watson, has published 22 scientific papers since joining the faculty in 2017—and still found time to mentor 25 senior thesis students and 32 summer students.

“The contribution of students has just been phenomenal,” Fey says. “The number of unique, really talented, really hardworking students that have contributed to this is impressive. And I’ve been really lucky to work with that cast of characters.”

Tags: Awards & Achievements, Professors, Research