Ben Wasserman
Ben joined the lab in September of 2021 as a postdoc working with collaborators in EEB and the Neag School of Education to use approaches from ecology to study patterns of retention and attrition in STEM teachers from Connecticut secondary schools with an eye towards equity for both students and teachers.
He originally trained as an aquatic and evolutionary ecologist. He is interested in the maintenance of phenotypic variation within species and the role such variation can play in species interactions, communities, and conservation applications.
He received his PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Maine.
Dipanjana Dalui
Dipanjana joined the lab in August 2017 as a PhD student.
She is interested in plant and fungal pathogen interactions in the tropics and how it can give rise to diversity, and studies it using mathematical modelling and simulations.
Valerie Milici
Val graduated with a PhD from UConn in 2022. Her PhD examined the effects of environmental gradients on plant-fungal interactions, including fieldwork in Panama.
On graduating, Val moved to a post-doctoral research associate position at the University of Arizona where she is working on the role of plant-microbial interactions in soil development during primary succession
James Mickley
James joined the lab as Postdoctoral Research Associate working on how forest ecology and species’ interactions in Connecticut are affected by forest fragmentation as part of the Fragmented Ecological Networks project (2018 – 2020).
James has moved to the position of herbarium curator at Oregon State University.
In addition to a strong interest in botany, James is an avid programmer, teaches workshops on Software Carpentry, and is developing inexpensive weather stations to measure microenvironment. For more information, please see James’s website.
Ashwin Viswanathan
Ashwin graduated with a PhD from ETH Zurich in 2018. Ashwin’s work investigated the effects of forest fragmentation on species diversity in the Western Ghats, South India. In particular, his PhD worked on the effects of forest fragmentation on the Janzen-Connell mechanism.
He is now working at the Nature Conservation Foundation in Bangalore, India. For more information, please see Ashwin’s website.
Shihong Jia
Shihong worked in the lab for six months as a visiting scholar during his PhD at the Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He worked on how biotic and abiotic factors, such as soil pathogens, insects, large mammals as well as snow cover affected the species diversity in Changbaishan Mountain, Northeastern China.
Shihong is now an Assistant Professor in Ecology at the Northwestern Polytechnical University in China.