Rate My Professor Caitlin Hicks Pries

Caitlin Hicks Pries is an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at Dartmouth College and a faculty member in the Graduate Program in Ecology, Evolution, Ecosystems and Society. She earned a B.A. from Middlebury College, an M.S. in Soil and Water Science from the University of Florida, and a Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Florida. Prior to joining Dartmouth, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Hicks Pries has been honored with the S.A. Wilde Early Career Achievement Award in 2018, the Outstanding Early Career Scientist award from the European Geosciences Union Biogeosciences Division in 2020, and a five-year National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) grant in 2023 to investigate the impacts of winter climate change, including decreasing snow cover, on soil carbon dynamics.

Her research examines the terrestrial carbon cycle, determining how the interplay between soil and plant processes and climate affects ecosystem carbon balance, with a particular focus on the stability of deep soil organic carbon in temperate ecosystems and its response to climate change. Hicks Pries uses isotopic tools, including enriched 13C and 15N, δ13C, and radiocarbon (∆14C), to trace the fate of plant-derived organic matter in soils, partition ecosystem respiration into autotrophic and heterotrophic sources, estimate soil carbon age, and model carbon processes. As principal investigator of the Hicks Pries Lab, she leads projects on soil carbon vulnerability to global change factors such as snowmelt timing, freeze-thaw cycles, permafrost thaw, and plant-microbe-mineral interactions in northern hardwood forests and Arctic tundra ecosystems. Key publications include "The whole-soil carbon flux in response to warming" (Science, 2017), "Old soil carbon losses increase with ecosystem respiration in experimentally thawed tundra" (Nature Climate Change, 2016), "Root litter decomposition slows with soil depth" (Soil Biology & Biochemistry, 2018), "Using Respiration Quotients to Track Changing Sources of Soil Respiration Seasonally and with Experimental Warming" (Biogeosciences, 2020), "Decadal warming causes a consistent and persistent shift from heterotrophic to autotrophic respiration in contrasting permafrost ecosystems" (Global Change Biology, 2015), and "Moisture drives surface decomposition in thawing tundra" (Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, 2013). Her scholarship, with over 5,000 citations, has advanced knowledge of soil carbon feedbacks to climate change and contributed to calls for international soil experiment networks.