We are hoping to hire up to two new graduate students in Fall 2023. If you’re interested in joining us, see our graduate opportunities page.

NSF graduate research fellowship program applications are due on October 17, and I’d be delighted to help you through the application process!

Dr. Ben Wasserman joined the lab this year. Ben’s research uses ecological approaches to study STEM teacher retention in Connecticut schools. Ben collaborates with Dr. John Settlage in UConn’s Neag School of Education.

We welcome Lucky Barahebuza to the group. Lucky is researching the effects of hunting on plant recruitment.

Congrats to Val Milici for a successful defense of her PhD. Val has started a post-doc with Dr. Katrina Dlugosch at the University of Arizona on the role of plant-microbial interactions in soil development during primary succession.

Congratulations to Dr. James Mickley for his new position as herbarium curator at Oregon State. As sad as we are to see him move on, we look forward to watching his career flourish in his new role!

Congratulations to Val Milici, who just landed a 1-year pre-doctoral fellowship from the Smithsonian Institution. Val will continue her work on how pathogen-plant interactions are affected by precipitation gradients and seasonality to structure tropical tree communities.

Val Milici led the lab in writing a review paper on how pathogen-plant interactions might vary along tropical precipitation gradients, and how that could impact plant diversity. Read it here.

New paper led by Riley Anderson out now in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

We find that parasitism of dietary specialist caterpillars increases with patch size of forest fragments, but parasitism of dietary generalists is unaffected. Addtionally, dietary specialist caterpillars were more sensitive than dietary generalists to inter-annual variation in diet quality.

Lots of people contributed to this one, including two awesome undergrads from our lab, Nikki Pirtel and Christian Connors, and post-doc James Mickley – nice work guys! Thanks also to our collaborators in Mike Singer’s lab at Wesleyan – undergrad Nicole Dallar and grad student Riley Anderson.

New paper out with Eleanor Slade, Nadine Keller and Chris Philipson on how biodiversity can improve simultaneous provision of many ecosystem functions – in particular we consider how competition might affect BEMF relationships.

Christian is interviewed about his work in the lab on how fragmentation affects parasitism rates of Connecticut Lepidoptera  – check it out here.  Christian has been working in the lab for two summers now, first as an NSF-REU in 2018 student and is funded by a SURF grant he obtained this year.