Professor Ellen Wohl, a geosciences professor specializing in fluvial science and geomorphology, is now a University Distinguished Professor. Wohl has made a formative impact on her field, and is widely known in her department, Warner College of Natural Resources and CSU as a phenomenal faculty mentor to students and an outstanding teacher.
Wohl has sustained an exceptional level of scholarly international service and recognition, including 18 years on the editorial board of the key journal in her field, Geomorphology, and as a multiple society fellow, in both the Geologic Society of America and the American Geophysical Union. She has previously won CSU’s Scholarship Impact Award and Warner College’s Outstanding Mentor award. She is the only person to receive the G.K. Gilbert Award from the Association of American Geographers twice. Recently, she received the Ralph Alger Bagnold medal from the European Geosciences Union for her outstanding contributions to the field of geomorphology.
Wohl’s extensive research impacts include 175 CV-listed publications, 29 book chapters, and 14 books or other special publications, 12 of which she is the first author on. Her work is broad and prominent across fluvial sciences and beyond, with contributions that include interactions between river profiles and tectonism, the influences of woody debris on river flow and geomorphology, historic benchmarking of flooding in rivers, debris flows, carbon cycling and biogeochemistry, ecological river restoration, and the historic role of beavers in post-glacial floodplain development. Her work appears in a number of prestigious journals including Nature Communications and Nature Climate Change.
She’s an exceptional mentor to both graduate and undergraduate students, routinely receiving high marks on student evaluations for her knowledge of the subject, effectiveness of teaching and overall ratings. Her work with graduate students is nothing less than prolific, having been an advisor to 43 master’s students and 23 doctoral students during her 27-year career at CSU.