Her research is focused in physiological ecology. Her masters thesis was on sea urchins and their physiological impacts due to near future sea surface temperatures. She did a laboratory study that focused on the behavioral and feeding changes that occurred when sea urchins were exposed to increase water temperatures. She also did a field study that described distribution of those sea urchins in their natural habitat and related it back to her laboratory study.

Caitlyn Collins is from Philadelphia, PA. She received her Bachelor of Science in Marine Science and General Biology from East Stroudsburg University. Her undergraduate research explored meiofauna populations and how climate could impact their communities. She attends Bloomsburg University, pursuing a Master of Science. Her thesis research examines the thermal tolerance of the sea urchins Echinometra lucunter and Eucidaris tribuloides and how it affects their feeding rates. This is being done in the laboratory at Bloomsburg University, as well as in the field in Roatan, Honduras and the Florida Keys. This will help predict how the sea urchins physiology could change with ocean warming and the impact that will have on their respective environments.

We study sensorimotor control of animal movement, using a “control theoretic” perspective; specifically, we use mathematical models of biomechanics, together with principles of control theory, to design perturbations. The responses to these perturbations can be used to furnish a quantitative description of the way the nervous system processes sensory information for control.

Noah J. Cowan received a BS degree from the Ohio State University, Columbus, in 1995, and MS and PhD degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1997 and 2001 – all in electrical engineering. Following his PhD, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley for two years. In 2003, he joined the mechanical engineering department at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, where he is now a professor. Prof. Cowan’s research interests include mechanics and multisensory control in animals and machines. Prof. Cowan received the NSF PECASE award in 2010, the James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award in Complex Systems in 2012, and the William H. Huggins Award for excellence in teaching in 2004.

Broadly, I'm an evolutionary ecologist interested in how animals, particularly reptiles, adapt to environmental change. My current research uses reptiles with temperature-dependent sex determination as a model to ask questions about behavioral adaptation to climate change and the evolutionary consequences of phenotype plasticity. I use a combination of modelling and field experiments to address these questions.

I'm a postdoctoral researcher working at Kellogg Biological Station. I'm originally from Sydney, Australia, where I started my PhD investigating local climate adaptation in reptiles. However, when covid and extreme weather made my field sites inaccessible, I got into modelling! I'm keen to learn new techniques to model ecological and evolutionary processes, and to share what I know about individual-based simulations.

In my research, I use modeling approaches to ask how elements of biological complexity impact community diversity and trait structure. For example, I showed that some commonly made assumptions about resource use can vastly overestimate coexistence. Focusing on competitive dynamics, I have examined how outcomes are affected by immigration, regional diversity, genetic mutations, multidimensional niche space, intraspecific variation, demographic structure, and environmental spatial structure.

One area of focus has been to demonstrate the generality of a phenotypic pattern of coexistence, whereby competing species cluster by traits. Having shown that the phenomenon is robust to stochastic forces common in nature, I found that tropical trees in Panama are clustered my maximum height and wood density, a result that corroborates previous classifications of Neotropical forests into vertical layers associated with competition for light.

Going forward, I plan to focus my research on advancing ecological theory linking community assembly processes to macroecological patterns, and confronting this theoretical framework with data. This research program is especially aimed at high-diversity systems such as tropical forests, where we need to better understand how stochastic and deterministic forces interact to shape communities and maintain biodiversity.

I am a community ecologist. I am interested in how species interactions create order in complex ecosystems. My research tries to answer questions such as What are the relative roles of deterministic and stochastic forces in shaping communities and influencing which species get to coexist? Conversely, what can specific combinations of species and their traits reveal about the forces underlying ecological dynamics? What are the key mechanisms behind species coexistence in highly biodiverse communities such as tropical forests?

I am currently a postdoc at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I completed my PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan in 2016. I have a bachelor's degree in physics from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and a master's degree in physics from Stony Brook University.

I consider myself a theoretician bent on grounding theory in biological realism. To do so, I draw on mathematical tools, computational methods, and collaborations with colleagues with natural history expertise ranging from tropical forests to microbial communities.

At the heart of all of our studies are the interactions between individual organisms and between organisms and their physical environment. These are the concerns of an emerging field know as ecological mechanics. By exploring the mechanical and physiological design of nearshore organisms, we hope to reveal how they evolved to thrive and compete amidst the severe stresses of the wave-swept shore. The principles that have guided evolution and ecology in this exceptionally harsh environment can provide valuable insight into the design of all plants and animals, and will help us to understand how organisms will cope with our changing climate.

I was introduced to biomechanics by Steve Wainwright and Steve Vogel while I was an undergraduate at Duke. I then had the privilege of working with John Gosline at UBC for my doctorate on the thrilling subject of slug slime. A postdoc with Bob Paine at U. Washington introduced me to the ecological side of biomechanics. After a short stint at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, I moved to Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station, where I have been ever since.

My research focuses on modulation of pattern generating networks in crustaceans, particularly the cardiac and stomatogastric ganglia of lobsters and stretch feedback in the lobster cardiac neuromuscular system.

My research is grounded in ethologically relevant questions that inform both the fundamental principles of brain function and how organisms interact with, and are shaped by, their environments. I use a variety of behavioral, genetic, and imaging approaches to investigate how Drosophila adaptively organize behavior in naturalistic temperature environments. My research demonstrates that flies flexibly pattern essential behaviors including food attraction, sleep, and courtship around thermal context such that temperature cues, rather than circadian rhythms, often dominate the timing of specific behaviors. That is, flies use relevant sensory cues to reorganize their behavior to meet their physiological needs in a manner that is both flexible and stereotyped.
I leverage this system to examine how distinct sensory signals drive behavioral state transitions and how the brain integrates aligned or competing sensory inputs to prioritize actions. I take advantage of the large genetic toolkit in Drosophila to link behavior directly to neurons and neural circuits. In parallel, I am interested in developing computational models to gain insight into the principles by which sensory cues are integrated to generate adaptive behavior. My long-term goal is to apply these principles of sensory gating and integration to build better frameworks for sensory feedback and processing, with potential applications in artificial systems and prosthetic technologies.

I am a Neuroscience PhD Candidate at Yale University where I am finishing my thesis in the lab of James Jeanne. I am largely interested in how organisms use different types of sensory information to form flexible and adaptive behaviors. I first studied how organisms use a combination of biomechanical and neuromodulatory mechanisms to generate flexible behavior in the heart of the American lobster with Amy Johnson while an undergrad at Bowdoin College in Maine. After college, I spent a few years in the Morocco as a Peace Corps Volunteer where I wore many hats, including teacher and documentarian. I learned to speak Arabic and adopted an incredibly cute puppy who now lives with me in Connecticut. Following my time in the Peace Corps, I moved to Seattle to work with John Tuthill at the University of Washington. I was introduced to the fruit fly model system and spent three years studying proprioception and motor control during locomotion. I learned how to code and developed a healthy love for ‘tinkering’ on both hardware and software in the lab. This period of my life was also when I realized I wanted to stay in academia and pursue a career doing research and teaching. Fortunately, sometimes the code just works: I will be joining the faculty at Bowdoin College in 2027 in the neuroscience department where my lab will be studying how fruit flies use cues from different sensory modalities to flexibly control adaptive behavior.

My research interests center around two core and related questions: 1.) How do (abiotic) environments determine whether and where animals persist?, and 2.) How do animals respond, at cellular to organismal to population levels, to environmental challenges? In tackling these questions, I have worked with diverse animals that live in diverse environments: from tropical frogs and orchid bees to subtropical hummingbirds to north temperate agricultural pests and pollinators to Rocky Mountain stoneflies, Sierra Nevada fruit flies and Himalayan bumble bees . Regardless of the organism, I combine detailed characterization of the environments they live in with physiological experiments to measure function in those environments and often with modeling to broaden findings to other systems.

I received my BS in Zoology from University of Texas, Austin, my PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle, and then did postdocs at UW and the University of Califronia, Berkeley before joining the faculty at the University of Wyoming in 2009.