Hannah Yin

Biography

As a postdoctoral research fellow with Notre Dame’s JTS Initiative, Hannah will lead and facilitate quantitative research for the synthesis working group “Climate Change, Biodiversity, & Environmental Justice: A Synthesis of Ecological & Socioeconomic Risks” developed in partnership between JTS and the University of Michigan's Institute for Global Change Biology (IGCB). So far, Hannah is using the working group’s global dataset on thermal performance curves across organisms, to refine and implement the group’s various objectives. She is particularly interested in the synthesis effort’s potential to explore how temperature-driven shifts in seasonality and day-night cycles create joint challenges and actionable opportunities for biodiversity management and environmental justice under climate change. Hannah also helps plan the daily agendas of multi-day working group meetings.

In transitioning to this role at Notre Dame’s JTS Initiative, Hannah completed her doctorate in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Rice University, where she leveraged multiple data sources and computational tools to study the timing of recurring biological events–like birdsong at dawn or autumn leaves falling–as a basis for assessing ecological impacts of environmental change and human disturbance. Hannah also brings peer leadership experience in sustainability, including running a small grant program to incentivize sustainable practices in student-run events and launching a residential composting program now in its sixth year with a local business and graduate apartment managers. Before graduate school, Hannah earned her undergraduate degree from Tufts University, where she double-majored in Biology and Computer Science.