I am establishing a research program in aquatic animal performance that aims to understand the diversity of life by considering both individual functional traits and their integrated functions across scales. Projects occur along 3 trajectories: 1) sub-organismal physiological, anatomical, and biomechanical mechanisms generating functional diversity, 2) patterns and processes governing whole-organism traits, and 3) the supra-organismal ecological and evolutionary feedback affecting the persistence of form-function relationships. We are using model systems including Pacific marine sculpins, freshwater sunfish, and livebearing mosquitofish (Gambusia).

I earned my PhD in 2014 from the University of California, Riverside. After completing a NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Colorado State University, I started as an Assistant Professor at Georgia Southern University in 2017. In 2020, I moved to University of Louisiana at Lafayette to continue to build my research program.

My research addresses questions regarding the evolution and ecology of phenotypic and functional diversity through the lens of comparative biomechanics and functional morphology. Fundamentally, I seek to explain how evolutionary changes in the musculoskeletal system facilitate or constrain the diversification of animals in different environments. Common research themes include: 1) the locomotor biomechanics across the fin-limb transition in vertebrate evolution, 2) morphological diversity driven by phenotypic selection, and 3) the eco-mechanics of locomotion across different environments. My interdisciplinary research integrates empirical and theoretical approaches, including inverse dynamics, high-speed videography, materials science and engineering, statistics, mathematics, and computer modeling.

Sandy Kawano is an Assistant Professor at George Washington University, USA, where she integrates biology, materials science, and engineering to study the comparative biomechanics and functional morphology of animal locomotion. She received her undergraduate degree in Evolution, Ecology, and Biodiversity from the University of California, Davis, USA, in 2008 before completing her PhD with Richard Blob at Clemson University, USA, in 2014. After completing postdoctoral fellowships at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, USA and the Royal Veterinary College, UK, she was appointed Assistant Professor at California State University, Long Beach, USA from 2017 to 2019.

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.

Predicting species distributions relies on our ability to estimate the costs of life under current climatic conditions, and to predict how costs will change under future climate scenarios. Mammals are endotherms, which allows them to perform optimally over a wide range of environmental temperatures. However, the energetic costs of maintaining an elevated body temperature varies widely over the range of environmental temperatures experienced by an animal over its lifetime. Surprisingly, our understanding of the costs of living and the relationship between environmental temperatures and performance in mammals, is poor, especially with regards to the effects of high environmental temperature and humidity. Using mammals as model organisms, my research seeks to address gaps in our fundamental understanding of mammalian energetics using a combination of laboratory and field-based projects aimed at elucidating the effects of activity, humidity, and high ambient temperature on the performance (and ultimately the distribution) of endotherms.

I am an evolutionary and ecological physiologist primarily interested in the comparative energetics and the evolution of mammalian temperature regulation. My research lies at the intersections of comparative physiology, ecology and evolutionary biology, and the synergies between these disciplines. Through field and laboratory based experiments, I seek to understand how rigidity or flexibility in metabolism and body temperature regulation affects the energetics of a species, and how their evolutionary history has shaped these patterns. The data obtained through studying thermoregulation and energetics can have multiple applications. By understanding the dynamics of the relationship between an animal and its thermal environment, we can better predict energy budgets and responses to changes in climate and resource availability.

My overall goals are to improve our theoretical and applied understanding of the effects of climate on ecological systems. To this end, I develop ecological and physiological approaches that bring new mechanistic insights into how environments affect organisms. Such insights are crucial for understanding ecological responses to climate change and for developing management and conservation strategies that can help species maintain their ecological niches under future climates.

I am a Senior Lecturer(an equivalent title to Assistant Professor in the USA) at the School of Zoology of Tel Aviv University since 2018. I earned my Ph.D. in Tel Aviv University’s Department of Zoology in 2010 and completed a postdoctoral appointment at the School of Life Sciences of Arizona State University in 2017. For my dissertation at Tel Aviv University, I was primarily concerned with understanding how ecological, physiological, and evolutionary forces shape organismal activity patterns in the Judean desert, a relatively harsh and unpredictable environment. During my postdoctoral appointment, I have shifted my model animals to reptiles, studying the biological effects of climate change using empirical observations and individual-based models. Currently, my lab broadly explores subjects in ecological physiology and climate change, with a strong emphasis on the relationships between animals and the environment. In particular, I integrate remote sensing data with microclimate and individual-based models on the one hand, and empirical observations at climatic gradients on the other.