THOMAS H. KUNZ RECOGNITION AWARD

BETH CLARE

2025 - NASBR 53 - EDMONTON, CANADA

Elizabeth (Beth) Clare is an Associate Professor of Biology at York University and a Research Associate at the Royal Ontario Museum whose research focuses on bat ecology through molecular innovation. She is at the forefront of using DNA metabarcoding to reveal the diets, trophic interactions, and ecological networks of bats, establishing methodological standards. Her research has expanded from diet analysis to large-scale biodiversity assessment, culminating in her recent development of airborne environmental DNA as a non-invasive tool for detecting bats and other terrestrial wildlife and for monitoring ecosystems at unprecedented scales. With nearly 100 peer-reviewed publications, her work has become foundational to molecular ecology and conservation biology. Dr. Clare is a dedicated mentor and teacher, having supervised more than 50 graduate and undergraduate researchers and created the BioAudio podcast to make evolutionary and ecological concepts broadly accessible to the public. She has earned multiple awards recognizing her scientific leadership, public outreach, and innovative scholarship, and is an elected member of the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars as of 2024. She has been a member of NASBR for more than two decades and remains an active and generous contributor to the bat research community.

JOY O'KEEFE

2025 - NASBR 52 - GUADALAJARA, MEXICO

Joy O’Keefe is an Assistant Professor and Wildlife Extension Specialist at the University of Illinois whose career has shaped bat biology, conservation, and public understanding of bats in the United States. She began working with bats in the early 2000s, completed her PhD at Clemson University. O’Keefe is recognized for her comprehensive studies of threatened and endangered species—including Indiana bats, gray bats, Virginia big-eared bats, northern long-eared bats, and Florida bonneted bats—work that has generated foundational insights into their roosting ecology, migration, behavior, thermal biology, and responses to forest management and environmental change. Her long-term collaborations, especially within the Hardwood Ecosystem Experiment, have demonstrated both how bats shape forest communities and how management practices can support bat population recovery. An authority on artificial roost design, she leads efforts to establish evidence-based guidance for safe and effective bat boxes. O’Keefe has published over 40 peer-reviewed papers, and played a major national role in NABat, the IUCN Bat Working Group, and multiple regional working groups. A dedicated mentor, she has trained dozens of graduate students, postdocs, and emerging bat biologists, and her outreach legacy includes directing the Center for Bat Research, Outreach, and Conservation and expanding the ISU Bat Festival into a major regional event. Her service to NASBR—including six years on the Board and leadership of key committees—reflects her deep commitment to the bat research community.

GERALD CARTER

Gerald Carter is an Associate Professor at The Ohio State University and a Research Associate at The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Obsessed with bats since he was two years old, he sought out opportunities to study bats as an undergraduate at Cornell University. There, he sequenced the prey DNA in vampire bat feces and assisted with experiments on running in vampire bats. As a MSc student with Brock Fenton, he studied vocal communication, and later worked on learning and cognition. He began a series of experiments on cooperation and social bonding in vampire bats as a PhD student with Jerry Wilkinson and later as a postdoctoral fellow at Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior. These experiments revealed how vampire bats formed cooperative social relationships, providing new insights into the  evolution of cooperative traits. He has published over 70 scientific publications. His work often garners positive media attention about bats in venues such as The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, PBS, and the BBC.  His research has earned him prestigious early career awards from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Animal Behavior Society, and the American Psychological Association. He is passionate about science outreach and helped create two outreach event series: Noche del Murciélago ("Bat Night") at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and The Ohio Bat Festival. He serves on the Board of Directors of Bat Conservation International and the Board of Directors at NASBR. He currently manages the NASBR website. He has attended almost every NASBR since 2003. As a PhD student in 2010, he won a competition to design the NASBR logo.

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.