This spring, UW President Ana Mari Cauce and Provost Tricia Serio announced the recipients of the 2025 Awards of Excellence. For over 50 years, these awards have honored and celebrated outstanding faculty, staff, students and alumni whose achievements exemplify the University’s mission. 

SEFS graduate student and instructor Robert Swan was selected as the recipient of the 2025 Excellence in Teaching Award. Swan’s deep knowledge across many fields of science and statistics, combined with his dedication to mentoring undergraduates and other graduate students has made a lasting impact on the SEFS community. Swan’s work with students, both in research and extracurricular activities, including the restarting of the UW Beekeeping Club and the Society of American Foresters, have fostered invaluable learning experiences and helped guide the career paths of the next generation of scientists. 

Swan will be presented with the award and honored at the annual Awards of Excellence ceremony on June 12, 2025. We are so thrilled to see Robert honored and celebrated – congratulations Robert!

We met up with Robert for an introduction to the UW’s surviving honey bee hive, “Beeyonce” to discuss his current projects and plans for the future. While we were there we filmed Swan splitting the hive.

This is the second year in a row that you’ve been recognized for your outstanding mentoring and teaching. Last year you were selected by Dean Tolstoy to receive the 2024 College of the Environment Exceptional Mentoring of Undergraduates Award. How do you approach mentoring? How has this been instrumental in your teaching philosophy?

Robert Swan: First I want to say how blessed and fortunate I have been to receive these recognitions. There are hundreds of incredibly talented instructors at the UW, and I take pride in being able to contribute my small part in the exceptional education taking place in SEFS and the UW. There  are many other instructors equally or more deserving of this recognition — I’m just lucky to have a community around me that nominated me, and I am so thankful for that. I encourage everyone to pay attention to these awards and take the time to nominate those who have a positive impact on you and others! 

My successful mentoring and teaching has developed thanks to the many great mentors I’ve had myself in SEFS. Professors Eric Turnblom, Greg Ettl, Dan Vogt, Kris Vogt, and Britt Johnson have all been incredibly supportive and have made it possible for me to pursue my graduate education and pay my way through almost exclusively by teaching. I would not be where I am without the trust and support of these people. I did both my undergrad and my masters here at the UW as well, so have now had 11 years to learn from our many incredible mentors.

My teaching and mentoring philosophy centers around student-centered learning and making learning opportunities and curriculum engaging, accessible, relatable, and empowering for students. Learning happens uniquely in so many forms for many of us, whether through lectures, field trips, projects, papers, experiments, etc. Many students, including myself, frequently don’t feel stimulated nor inspired by traditional classroom formats, and furthermore students often have to balance responsibilities inside and outside of the UW. Relying too heavily on traditional, rigid education structures can do a disservice to many students and their colleagues as well. Recognizing that has motivated me to provide accommodating class formats and opportunities for experiential learning outside of the classroom. Varying our instructional style by including and emphasizing learning opportunities such as field trips, flipped classrooms, flexible projects, and giving students the chance to apply what they have learned in the real world does so much to create impactful and lasting learning for our students, and allows people with different learning styles to have a chance to succeed.

What is your secret for keeping your students motivated, energized and eager to lead as the next generation of scientists?

RS: I think that giving students freedom to explore, experiment, ask questions, and to mess up is super important, especially once we get to the level of students applying concepts to real-world scenarios. It’s really easy for those of us with experience to simply tell students the “correct” answer, and to intervene far too soon when students run into challenges. I think much higher-level, persistent learning takes place when students are given a foundation and some guidelines, and then allowed to test things out for themselves and take the lead in their own learning. The generations of managers after us will face challenges we aren’t even fully aware of yet, so empowering our students with critical thinking, creative solution development, and confidence in themselves is essential to prepare them to meet these challenges head on. 

Sounds like you and your students have big plans for the UW Bee Club this year. What can we expect to see from all of your upcoming hard work?

RS: Every year working with bees is a great chance to learn something new and try to refine our own personal understanding of bees, since each season can be so different! We are joining forces with the UW Farm with the shared goal of making interacting with bees a more stable and long-lasting opportunity for UW students. We’re hoping to revive the annual bee class that the UW has on the books, and currently have students setting up a capstone to observe native and domesticated bee interactions with UW farm cover crops. We’ll be adding a few more honey bee hives, and are aiming to be able to harvest honey and beeswax products to sell to the community to fund the continued beekeeping efforts. 

We also recently set up a station to raise and support native Mason bees, and have collaborated with Green U District to install pollinator habitats and pollinator friendly landscaping around the University District, with a focus on underserved communities. We’re also finding creative ways to utilize waste products from keeping honey bees — this year we’ll be turning our old worn-out beehives into wildlife nesting boxes for installation around the UW, and other materials are being used in student art projects at UW’s Ceramic + Metal Arts Building!

You support the Society of American Foresters. What upcoming projects do you have in store? How can people and the public in general get involved?

RS: The Society of American Foresters (SAF) is an exceptional way for students to diversify their skillset during their time at UW, especially in terms of practical skills that they can use to market themselves for jobs and internships. SAF is also an incredible way to network with professionals from all types of environmental management backgrounds and for students to find support, with annual conferences, continuing education courses, internships, and scholarships for SAF members. Last year, SAF collaborated with Pack Forest to establish a new research site by planting 1,000 agroforestry species, held a chainsaw training event, rescued saplings from development, and assisted with some of the many exciting research projects hosted at Pack. 

This year we’re planning to do an even more in-depth chainsaw training event, hold numerous skill building workshops, assist in more research projects, and thanks to a grant from the Kurt Gottschalk Science Fund, we will be gathering data on a huge cultivar collection of agroforestry species like chestnuts and walnuts in Mt. Vernon! Folks interested in getting involved can get in touch with me at SwanR820@gmail.com. 

You’ve been recognized for going above and beyond in providing students with valuable training by serving as a reference, supervising projects and providing community and networking opportunities. Any upcoming community or networking opportunities that we can share with the SEFS community?

RS: Right now I’m working with the King County Department of Natural Resources, the Eastside Audubon Society, Seattle Public Utilities Cedar River Watershed, and some local community governments to connect UW students and RSOs with locations to run undergraduate capstone projects, MFR projects, MS/Ph.D level research, and volunteer events. These organizations are all extremely excited to work with our student body and these are exceptional opportunities to connect with organizations that host internships and job opportunities as well. Our current project is a 20 acre site owned by King County outside of Fall City, which is being used for an MFR student to develop a site management plan with multiple uses including wildlife research, accessible public greenspace for an underrepresented population, flood mitigation, local tribal cultural uses, and engagement opportunities for the community to participate in restoration efforts, outreach, and education.

Do you know what you’ll be teaching in the upcoming summer and fall quarters? What should curious students expect from these courses?

RS: I’m sad to say I’ll be leaving SEFS soon! I’ve been so fortunate to spend so much time teaching here, and really love our community, courses, and our students. I’ll be wrapping up my dissertation this summer, and moving on to other work in the Puget Sound region. I’m currently teaching my last in-person course, ESRM 428, principles of silviculture. It’s the second in our silviculture course series, following ESRM 323. I highly recommend students take both of these courses even if you don’t intend to focus on forest management specifically. This is a series that emphasizes hands-on, field centered experiences that get students a front row seat to the many aspects that keep holistically managed forests thriving in the Pacific Northwest, while putting students into the driver seat of making decisions. This weekend we went down to Pack forest for the students to finalize their plans to thin a forest to meet objectives that they got to determine. For most of them this is the first chance to apply much of what they have learned in SEFs, and when we return next weekend, the trees they chose will actually have been harvested, and they will get to assess the results of their decisions! To me, this trip is one of the best learning experiences a student can get in SEFS. 

Robert – anything else you’re itching to share? 

RS: As I depart, I hope that SEFS will continue to teach and encourage active, responsible management of our natural resources, strive to equip our students with practical, real-world skills, and foster a learning environment that welcomes all of the many diverse perspectives, values, and experiences that make our field so rich *and* so challenging. I implore SEFS to further facilitate inclusive, constructive discussion and objective consideration skills among the student body and faculty, to ensure that we are nurturing an environment where students can openly discuss conflicting, controversial opinions and perspectives. The students we are responsible for will be charged with making difficult, conflict-ridden decisions, and we need to equip them with all of the skills they need to successfully meet these challenges and represent the people and natural areas that depend on them. Go Huskies!