Hilary Dugan
Associate Professor
she/her/hers
Hasler Laboratory
Center for Limnology
Research
Aquatic Biology, Ecology
Hilary Dugan is a limnologist and Associate Professor at the Center for Limnology, where she studies how climate change and human activities alter lake ecosystems. Her research combines long-term ecological datasets, high-frequency sensor observations, spatial analysis, and data science to understand changes in water quality, lake physics, and ecosystem function. A major focus of her work is understanding how freshwater systems respond to changing climate, including lake warming, ice loss, and salinization. Her research spans temperate lakes in Wisconsin and extreme environments in Antarctica, providing opportunities to understand how aquatic ecosystems respond across broad environmental gradients. Dugan’s work integrates field-based ecology with data-intensive approaches to identify long-term changes in freshwater ecosystems and improve our ability to predict their future trajectories.
Education
PhD, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois Chicago, 2014
MSc, Physical Geography, Queen’s University, 2010
BScH, Physical Geography and Biology, Queen’s University, 2008