THOMAS H. KUNZ RECOGNITION AWARD

WINIFRED FRICK

Winifred (Fred) Frick is Chief Scientist at Bat Conservation International and an Associate Adjunct Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She grew up in California, completing her B.A. in Environmental Studies from University of California, Santa Cruz. She started her career with bats in 2000 when she started working as a consultant before starting graduate school. She received her Ph.D. in Forest Science at Oregon State University in 2007, where she studied the community structure of island bats off the Baja California peninsula in northwestern Mexico. For her postdoctoral fellowship with Tom Kunz at Boston University, she studied on the population impacts of white-nose syndrome and worked with Tom on advancing radar aeroecology. She joined BCI in 2016 where she now directs high priority research and development of scalable solutions for achieving meaningful conservation outcomes for bats. She has published over 90 scientific publications and is a strong advocate for mentoring the next generation of researchers. Collaboration is core to her ethos and she works with many researchers and contributes to bat conservation groups, including the North American Bat Monitoring program, the Global Union of Bat Diversity Networks (GBatNet), Bat1K, North American Alliance for Bat Conservation (NABCA), and IUCN Bat Specialist Group, among others. She is an enthusiastic spokesperson for bats, including contributing to media coverage on the importance of bat conservation. Fred’s participation in NASBR began regularly in 2006. She’s participated numerous times as a mentor for the student lunches and starting in 2014 helped organize the first Women in Science Breakfast, which has since expanded into the annual Diversity in Science Breakfast.