Dr. Arial Shogren grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, where she spent a lot of her early life in and around the freshwater ecosystems near her home. She fell in love with aquatic science as part of a high school outdoor education course which took place on the St. Croix River in Northern Wisconsin. She pursued a growing passion for aquatic ecology and completed an undergraduate degree in Biology at Vassar College in 2013. She started graduate school at The University of Notre Dame, and earned her Ph.D. in Biological Sciences in 2018. After graduating from Notre Dame, she was an National Science Foundation Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Michigan State University in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences until Fall 2021. She is now an assistant professor at the University of Alabama in the Biological Sciences Department.

Dr. Shogren’s research has taken her to river networks flowing through the agricultural Midwest, cutting across Arctic Alaska, and meandering through the coastal plains of the Southeast. Her work combines methods from stream ecology, hydrology, and biogeochemistry to understand the fate and transport of materials in flowing waters, including dissolved and particulate materials, microplastics, and other novel materials.