Jessica Blois, University of California, Merced
Dr. Jessica Blois is currently an Assistant Professor of Ecology in Life and Environmental Sciences at UC Merced. Dr. Blois received her undergraduate degree in Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution from the University of California, San Diego and then worked for a few years for the U.S. Forest Service. She went on for graduate work, first to earn her M.A. in Biological Sciences from Humboldt State University in 2005, then her PhD in Biology from Stanford University in 2009. She worked as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison before moving to a faculty position at UC Merced in January 2013. Jessica is a paleoecologist interested in understanding the factors contributing to changes in genes, populations, and assemblages across time and space. She has particular interests in teasing apart the roles of environmental versus biotic drivers of biodiversity change, in merging data from different kinds of fossil proxies such as mammal bones and plant macrofossils, and in merging perspectives from the past and present to help conserve biodiversity into the future.
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Ellen Curano, University of Wyoming
Ellen Currano is a paleoecologist at the University of Wyoming with a joint appointment in the Department of Botany and the Department of Geophysics. Her research focuses on the response of ancient forest communities to environmental changes, with a focus on the Paleogene of the Western US and the Paleogene-Neogene transition in Africa. Ellen is also the co-founder of The Bearded Lady Project: Challenging the Face of Science (http://thebeardedladyproject.com; @beardedladyproj), a documentary film and photography project that celebrates the work of female paleontologists and highlights the challenges and obstacles that they face. |
Larisa R. G. DeSantis, Vanderbilt University
Larisa DeSantis is an assistant professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Vanderbilt University. Her work is aimed at understanding ecological and evolutionary responses to global change, at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. She uses modern, historic, and fossil records to inform ecologists and conservation biologists about floral and faunal responses to climate change, megafaunal extinctions, and human activities. Her Dietary Reconstructions and Ecological Assessments of Mammals (DREAM) lab, employs multiple-proxy methods to assess dietary behavior of mammals (including stable isotopes, dental microwear textures, dental mesowear/macrowear, and morphology). Collectively, her research program in conservation paleobiology and paleoecology clarifies dietary responses to warming climates from across the globe and throughout the Cenozoic, with a focus on the Pleistocene.
Website: https://www.vanderbilt.edu/ees/people/faculty/LarisaDeSantis.php |
Andrew Du, University of Chicago
Andrew Du is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago. He is interested in understanding how diversity changes across spatial, temporal, and taxonomic scales as a way to integrate neo- and paleoecological research. He is a paleontologist and paleoanthropologist at heart and has done field work studying Pleistocene mammals in Kenya and Tanzania. |
Angélica González, Rutgers
Janneke HilleRisLambers, University of Washington
Janneke HilleRisLambers is the Walker Professor of Natural History in the Biology Department at University of Washington, Seattle. The HilleRisLambers lab uses field observations, manipulative experiments, citizen science, and statistical modeling to study the relationship between climate and species distributions in space (ranges) and time (phenology). Primary study sites are in the Pacific Northwest (including Mt. Rainier and North Cascades National Park). See http://faculty.washington.edu/jhrl/Index.html and www.meadowatch.org for more details.
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Sarah Ivory, Brown University
Sarah Ivory is a paleoecologist using fossil pollen records along with models and remote sensing data to better understand the processes that drive tropical ecological change and vegetation responses to climate in the past. This work focuses on producing vegetation and climate histories from the recent past to millions of years ago in order to evaluate future range changes and land-use impacts in hotspots of global biodiversity. She is currently a postdoctoral scholar at Ohio State University in the Departments of Anthropology and Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology. Website - https://sarahivorypollen.wordpress.com Twitter - @sjivory |
Matthew Kling, UC Berkeley
Matthew is a PhD student in integrative biology at UC Berkeley, where his research focuses on understanding how plant species' geographic distributions are shaped by past and future climate change. His background includes work on conservation and climate adaptation projects for a variety of organizations, an NSF traineeship in data science, and research investigating the ecophysiological drivers of alpine treeline while an undergrad at Middlebury College. |
Kate Lyons, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Kate Lyons is interested in the factors affecting and controlling species diversity at multiple scales across both space and time. She is particularly interested in the effects of global climate change on species diversity and use the fossil record of mammals to evaluate how current changes in global climate may affect diversity patterns in the future. Because it provides a useful way to compare modern species and communities to fossil species and communities, she focused on the similarities and differences in macroecological patterns across space and time. Her affiliations are: Assistant Professor, University of Nebraska Lincoln; Research Associate, National Museum of Natural History; Smithsonian Institution; Co-director, Evolution of Terrestrial Ecosystems Program, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution
Twitter: @RealKateLyons |
Caitlin Mackenzie MacDonough, Boston University
Jenny McGuire, Georgia Tech
Jenny McGuire is a conservation paleontologist who is starting a tenure track faculty position at Georgia Tech in Fall 2017. She studies how emergent properties of intraspecific variation lead to species- and community-level responses to environmental change. She has training in the field of conservation biology and frequently uses paleontological or historical data to directly address the underlying assumptions of models being used to create on-the-ground conservation strategies.
Twitter: @JennyMcGPhD |
Abe Miller-Rushing, Acadia National Park
Annette Ostling, University of Michigan
Annette Ostling is an Associate Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan. She is also the Associate Director of the Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering, and an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan. She earned a Master’s Degree in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1999 and a PhD from the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley in 2004, completing her research under the direction of John Harte. She was then a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton from 2004 to 2006 with Simon Levin as her mentor. Her research is in theoretical community ecology, especially focused on the dynamics and mechanisms of competitive coexistence, and their influence on the structure of communities, and is particularly interested in tree communities. One of her goals is to develop theory to provide perspective on whether and how community pattern can provide insight into the dynamics and mechanisms of competitive coexistence.
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Will Pearse, Utah State
Will Pearse is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Utah State University. His work focuses on evolutionary ecology: linking models of the evolution of species and their traits to better understand and predict their present-day ecology. To do this, he develops a lot of statistical tools to help people ask new fundamental questions about their study systems.
Twitter: @willpearse
Outreach: Native American Science Mentorship Program, Utah State University
Neil Pederson, Harvard Forest
Neil Pederson is an ecologist at the Harvard Forest studying climate & forest history through the use of tree rings. In collaboration with other scientists, he is studying the dynamics of temperate, mesic forests (eastern US, the Colchic Temperate Rainforest in Turkey and the Republic of Georgia, Spain, and east Asia) across an array of spatial and temporal scales.
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David Post, Yale
Ben Seliger, University of Maine
Ben Seliger is a biogeographer interested in understanding what factors influence a species’ range size. Key motivating questions of his research are whether species will be able to keep up with projected climate change, and if we can identify which species will have the most difficulty doing so. He's especially interested in how range size is influenced by species functional traits, and how range size varies through time in response to climate change. |
Bryan Shuman, University of Wyoming
Allison Stegner, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Morgan Tingley, University of Connecticut
Morgan Tingley is an Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut and a Research Associate with the Institute for Bird Populations. His research combines field observations, citizen science databases, and statistical models to understand critical ecological questions about organisms, primarily birds. He research focuses on how large-scale anthropogenic drivers of change (e.g., climate change, invasive species, land-use change, fire regimes) affect geographic distributions and community interactions over short (years) to medium (centuries) timespans. Twitter: @mwtingley Instagram: @mwtingley |
Mark Vellend, Université de Sherbrooke
Mark Vellend is interested in how plant individuals, populations, and communities respond to environmental changes of various kinds, including climate warming and human-mediated disturbance. He has particular interests in: (i) historical studies using "old" vegetation surveys, records of early North American land surveyors, and herbarium records; (ii) overarching theories in ecology and evolution (including a recent book on the topic); (iii) facilitating efforts to synthesize knowledge of ecological dynamics and biodiversity change across a variety of ecosystem types.
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