November 2025 Awards and Accolades
Congratulations to this month's award recipients on the recognition of your achievements!
SOLS Professors Recognized in Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers 2025 list
Rodrigo Vargas and Arvind Varsani were recognized in this year’s Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers List.
Vargas is a professor at the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University (ASU), where he leads an interdisciplinary research program focused on ecosystem ecology, environmental data science, and global environmental change. He joined ASU in 2025 from the University of Delaware, where he developed an internationally recognized research program on carbon cycle science. Professor Vargas’s work emphasizes how nature-based solutions can mitigate the impacts of environmental changes across terrestrial and coastal ecosystems. His work integrates measurements, experiments, and numerical tools to refine the understanding of biosphere-atmosphere interactions from local to global scales.
Varsani is a molecular virologist who works across ecosystems from plants to animals and from the tropics to polar regions. His research uses a combination of traditional virology, microscopy, molecular and cellular biology techniques in conjunction with modern sequencing techniques, synthetic biology and bioinformatics to characterize viruses and understand their dynamics. His objectives are to: study viral dynamics in Ross Sea ecosystem which is recognized as anthropogenically the least-altered marine system on the planet with no evidence indicating introduction or range expansion of any species thus far, despite its changing physical environment; unravel the viral evolutionary dynamics as a consequence of changes in climate; and study viral ecological interaction networks within a microbiome and more broadly within phytobiomes in order to unravel the dynamics
of pathogen emergence.
Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers demonstrate significant and broad influence in their field(s) of research. Each researcher selected has authored multiple Highly Cited Papers which rank in the top 1% by citations for their field(s) and publication year in the Web of Science Core Collection over the past eleven years. However, citation activity is not the sole selection indicator. This list, based on citation data, is then refined using other quantitative metrics, as well as qualitative analysis and expert judgment.
Of the world’s population of scientists and social scientists, Highly Cited Researchers are 1 in 1,000.
Stephen Pyne
Stephen Pyne, Emeritus Professor in the Center for Biology and Society, was awarded the Ember Award from the International Association for Wildland Fire, the primary professional society for researchers of wildland fire. He has authored 31 books, mostly on the history and management of wildland and rural fire, including big-screen surveys for the U.S., Canada, Australia, Mexico, Europe (including Russia), and the Earth generally. His exploration research includes books on Antarctica, the Grand Canyon, the Voyager mission, a biography of Grove Karl Gilbert, and a summary history, The Great Ages of Discovery.
The purpose of the “Ember Award” is to recognize sustained excellence in wildland fire research and to encourage innovation, exploration, application, and dissemination of important research results. The name “Ember” reflects the fact that research and science often move slowly, and their benefits or impacts may not be apparent for years. The award was established to recognize sustained and excellent research contributions to wildland fire science, innovative solutions to important wildland fire challenges, and effective and appropriate communication of wildland fire science and research results.