Congratulations to Ian Wang, an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM), on receiving a 2026 Faculty Mentor Award from the UC Berkeley Graduate Assembly.
The annual awards recognize three Berkeley faculty members or teaching staff who go beyond the role of a standard advisor. Recipients are nominated by current students or recent alumni and selected for their commitment to providing students with personal support and development, and to helping shape their studies and further their careers.
“His guidance, advocacy, and unwavering support have profoundly shaped my graduate experience, my career trajectory, and my confidence as a researcher,” read Wang’s nomination. “I have spent enough time in academia to know how rare it is to have a mentor as dedicated and thoughtful as Ian.”
Wang’s research combines landscape genomics—the study of how differences in geographic and environmental variables influence genetic variation in plant and animal species—with remote sensing and evolutionary biology to examine how biodiversity changes across space and time. Central to his research ethos is a commitment to supporting graduate and undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds, promoting research from marginalized groups, and providing accessible research opportunities ranging from day-long shadowing to semester-long projects.
Notable collaborations with students that exemplify Wang’s approach to mentoring include co-authoring a study that identified global hotspots where the timing of seasonal cycles is out of sync with nearby locations. The project was led by Drew Terasaki Hart, PhD ’22 ESPM, and co-authored by UC Berkeley alumni Thảo-Nguyên Bùi, BS ’21 Environmental Sciences and Environmental Economics and Policy, and Lauren Di Maggio, BA ’21, MA ’23 Statistics. Results of the study were featured on the September 2025 cover of Nature. In another project, Wang developed a new landscape genomic analysis toolkit with former UC Berkeley postdoc Anne Chambers and current ESPM PhD student Anusha Bishop. The resource will be used to analyze more than 200 ecologically important plant and animal species for the California Conservation Genomics Project.
Wang was honored on April 16 alongside other faculty and graduate student mentorship award winners. This award is not the first time he has been recognized for supporting early-career scientists: he received the Faculty Award for Excellence in Postdoctoral Mentoring from UC Berkeley’s Visiting Scholar and Postdoc Affairs office in 2023.
