Cheryl Hayashi is a Hawaii-born biologist who is curator, professor, and Director of Comparative Biology Research at the American Museum of Natural History. She specializes in the genetic structure of spider silk. A Yale alumnus, she was previously a professor at University California Riverside, and was a 2007 MacArthur Fellow.

A central focus of my research is to connect individual-level processes to population-level outcomes. These cross-scale interactions are key to understanding things like eco-evolutionary dynamics, shifts in demography, population stability, and disease outbreaks. Moreover, connecting multiple scales of biological organization is proving increasingly crucial for addressing public health challenges such as the development of “evolution-proof” strategies to slow the evolution of virulence and antibiotic resistance.

My research program emphasizes the use of multi-disciplinary and quantitative approaches to science. My research lies at the interface of three traditionally separate bodies of research: consumer-resource ecology, physiology, and evolutionary epidemiology. I work within several focal systems and have developed collaborations with mathematicians, physiologists, ecologists, and conservation managers. Working across disciplines helps me think ‘outside the box’ and develop a unique skillset in meditating across multi-disciplinary teams.

My aim is that by bringing a theory-guided approach and an ecological lens to these important questions, the Hite lab will become a leader in translational research. To test (and advance) theory, my research program uses a variety of lab-based and natural systems as case-studies including freshwater zooplankton and fruit flies and both bacterial and fungal pathogens.

I am a quantitative eco-evolutionary biologist. My research lies at the interface of physiology, ecology, and evolutionary epidemiology. Broadly, I study how ecological variation shapes the interaction between individual life histories and the dynamics of populations and communities.

My approach integrates empirical and observational data with innovative statistical approaches (e.g., machine learning) and mathematical modeling. I use theory from population ecology and evolutionary epidemiology as a guide to develop and test general, yet mechanistic models that advance multiple fields.

For the past 10 years, my main focus has been on metamorphosis in the ocean, a process that has evolved numerous times in animals and non-animals. Across kingdoms, planktonic propagules face similar challenges: surviving (and in some cases growing) util they reach a "competent" stage to transform into juveniles, identification of suitable juvenile habitat when they arrive there, deciding whether to settle therein or wait for a potentially higher quality settlement habitat, and accomplishing the transformation itself. I use the word "challenges" here purposefully, as these early life stages need to function effectively as larvae and then make instantaneous decisions to abandon that life stage, undergoing what can be profound physiological and morphological changes into a benthic juvenile stage. A detailed understanding of this common yet diverse life cycle transformation that occurs at metamorphosis in marine organisms is not merely an intriguing cross-disciplinary problem, it represents a major knowledge gap that limits our understanding of and ability to predict trends in marine populations. In the face of profound anthropogenic ocean change, increasing our knowledge of these issues will be a key piece in our efforts to protect threatened marine ecosystems.

I am broadly interested in the nexus of ecology, development and evolution. Specifically. I am fascinated by how organisms assess their internal and external environments to make informed, consequential life history decisions. To me, the ultimate example of this phenomenon is metamorphosis, a process that has evolved numerous times in both animals and non-animals. I have studied the internal mechanics of metamorphosis –where developmental changes underlie both subtle and profound evolutionary change– and how marine larvae evaluate their external environment in order to increase their very long odds of recruitment into adult populations. I am committed to addressing climate change, which I have done largely through educational outreach.

Professor Hutchinson has worked on extant and extinct animals ranging from birds and crocodiles to elephants and many other mammals as well as extinct dinosaurs and early tetrapods. John uses a combination of theoretical and experimental techniques, from motion analysis or XROMM and force platforms to simple 2D static mechanics or complex 3D fully dynamic computer simulations.

John Hutchinson is a Professor of Evolutionary Biomechanics. John's research straddles the fields of evolutionary biology and biomechanics, with an emphasis on how very large animals stand and move and how locomotion evolved in different groups of land vertebrates. He is an American biologist who found a new home in the UK as a dual citizen. He gained a BS degree in Zoology at the University of Wisconsin in 1993, then received a PhD in Integrative Biology at the University of California with Kevin Padian in 2001, and rounded out his training with a two-year National Science Foundation bioinformatics Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Biomechanical Engineering Division of Stanford University with Scott Delp. John started at the Royal Veterinary College as a Lecturer in Evolutionary Biomechanics in 2003 in the Department of Veterinary Basic Sciences (now Department of Comparative Biomedical Sciences), in 2008 became a Reader, and in 2011 became a full Professor.

How do organisms respond and adapt to complex, variable natural environments? Our research integrates environmental physiology, ecology and evolution to address this question, using a combination of laboratory, field and modeling approaches. Much of our work is with temperate insects and their interactions with plants, but together with recent graduate students and colleagues we have also studied bacteriophage, echinoderm larvae, and tropical butterflies. One major theme in recent years is plastic and evolutionary responses to human-induced environmental changes—climate change, invasive species, agroecosystems—and their ecological consequences.

Joel was educated at St. Camillus Elementary, Thomas Johnson High, Duke, Wisconsin, Stanford, and UC-Berkeley, and held faculty positions at Brown University and University of Washington before moving to UNC in 2001. Over the years his research has involved biomechanics, environmental biophysics, physiology, ecology and evolution, but current foci are evolutionary and physiological ecology and population biology, mostly with insects and insect-plant interactions. He has a long-standing interest in educational software, and more recently in communicating science to non-science audiences. In his spare time Joel likes to hike and play guitar, and sometimes writes songs about biology.

I leverage genomic data sets to illuminate fundamental ecological and evolutionary processes in wild populations. My research foci fall into three major lines of inquiry: hybrid zones, adaptive responses to climate change, and fisheries and aquaculture in a changing environment.

University of Maryland BEES* PhD
The College of Charleston – the Graduate School Marine Biology MSc
The College of William and Mary History BA
*Behavior, Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics

Mimi Koehl studies the physics of how organisms interact with each other and their environments. Her goal is to elucidate basic physical rules that can be applied to different kinds of organisms about how body structure affects mechanical function in nature. I combine techniques from fluid and solid mechanics with those from biology and ecology to do experiments in the field as well as in the laboratory. She have been using this approach to address a variety of questions, including how microscopic creatures swim and capture food in turbulent water flow; how marine larvae recruit into benthic habitats; how being multi-cellular affects swimming, feeding, and predator avoidance in protozoan ancestors of animals; how morphology affects aerodynamic performance of extinct ancestors of flying insects and birds; how wave-battered marine organisms avoid being washed away; how hydrostatic organisms change shape and move through their habitats; and how suspension-feeding aquatic animals capture particles and how olfactory antennae catch odors from water moving around them.

Mimi Koehl, a Professor of the Graduate School in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, earned her PhD in Zoology at Duke University and did postdoctoral research at the University of Washington and at the University of York, UK. She studies the physics of how organisms interact with their environments. Professor Koehl is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has been the Executive Director of the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at UC Berkeley, and Chair of the Science Board of the Santa Fe Institute. Her awards include a MacArthur “genius grant,” a Presidential Young Investigator Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the John Martin Award (Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, for “for research that created a paradigm shift in an area of aquatic sciences”), the Borelli Award (American Society of Biomechanics, for “outstanding career accomplishment”), the Rachel Carson Award (American Geophysical Union, for "cutting-edge ocean science"), and the Muybridge Award (International Society of Biomechanics “highest honor”).

All ecological processes exhibit randomness or stochasticity. For complex systems with multiple interacting processes, the effects of stochasticity can combine in unexpected ways, leading to outcomes not predicted by traditional deterministic models. My research focuses on developing stochastic models of ecological processes that account for such randomness and thereby make better predictions. Where possible, I combine theoretical model building with empirical model validation. I am especially interested in applying stochastic modeling to better understand how populations and phenotypes will respond to climate change.

I became interested in pursuing ecology as a career after working as an undergraduate with Robert Jefferies (University of Toronto) in the Canadian Arctic. Following an M.Sc. on Arctic plant and insect phenology, I switched focus to ecological theory and for my Ph.D. (University of Colorado at Boulder) studied the effects of stochasticity on populations. My current research continues to focus on applications of stochastic modeling, particularly with respect to physiology and dispersal.