Congratulations to Byrd Center intern and Class of 2020 graduate Kira Harris for receiving this year's Henry Brecher Technical Achievement Award! 

This award is named in honor of Henry Heinz Brecher, one of the longest serving scientists at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. Any faculty, staff, or student who is involved in any work effort or research project at the Byrd Center may be nominated for this award.

Kira Harris laid the groundwork for an effort through which multiple researchers have collected 360-degree video footage in Alaska, Greenland, Peru, Great Basin National Park, Antarctica, the Arctic Ocean, and Ohio. She used this vast collection of footage, and idiosyncrasies within the footage, to establish best practices for gathering of 360-degree video and its use is creating immersive digital tours. Kira Harris has created tours of multiple landscapes and trained a number of Byrd Center research teams to capture 360-degree field footage. Furthermore, the research she performed in the School of Earth Sciences, including laboratory work and analysis, led to a first-author poster at the 2018 Geological Society of America’s Annual Meeting where she earned a Hydrogeology Section award. Kira presented both a first-author research poster and a first-author education poster at the AGU 2019 Fall Meeting, earning an Outstanding Student Presentation Award for her VR efforts. 

We are excited to see what opportunities lie ahead for Kira as she pursues a Master's Degree in Geography this fall at the University of Arizona.