Yuan Gao and Brooke Maslo Named Recipients of Faculty Awards

Photos of Yuan and Brooke

By Carol Peters

The two EOAS faculty members were among only 31 from across the university to receive awards. 

Photos of Yuan and Brooke
Yuan Gao (left) and Brooke Maslo (right)

Rutgers University has named two EOAS faculty members recipients of its 2020-2021 Faculty Year-End Awards. 

Professor Yuan Gao, in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University–Newark, has been awarded The Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research. The university said this award honors tenured faculty members who have made distinguished research contributions to their discipline and/or society at large. 

Assistant Professor Brooke Maslo, in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources, School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, Rutgers University–New Brunswick, received The Presidential Fellowship for Teaching Excellence. According to the university, the award honors newly-promoted and tenured (as of July 1, 2021) members of the faculty who have made truly outstanding contributions to teaching during their early years at Rutgers. 

As award winners, Gao and Maslo will receive commemorative certificates and honorariums. 

Rutgers University President Jonathan Holloway and Executive Vice President Prabhas Moghe announced the recipients of the annual University wide Faculty Awards for 2020-2021 on November 16, 2021. 

“Each year these awards have honored outstanding members of the Rutgers community selected by their colleagues for exceptional contributions to teaching, research, or public service through a program of eight awards,” Holloway wrote in an email to Rutgers University faculty and staff.

Gao’s research interests, according to her website, are in the fields of atmospheric chemistry, air-sea chemical exchange and air pollution. The goals of her research are to understand the processes affecting the atmospheric composition and its impact on the ocean biogeochemical cycles and the quality of human environment. Her research has spanned many regions, from the Asian coast to the U.S. East Coast, and from the Arctic Ocean to the Southern Ocean. 

Maslo, who is an extension specialist in wildlife ecology at the Rutgers Cooperative Extension, New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station, is trained as a quantitative conservation biologist, according to her lab website. Maslo routinely conducts mathematical, and statistical analyses examining demographics, population dynamics, and species distribution. She has published several peer-reviewed publications, book chapters, and fact sheets on species of conservation concern, and she has done her most recent work understanding the impacts of white-nose syndrome on little brown bats.