Faculty collaborator

Jennifer Burnaford

Jennifer Burnaford

  • Professor
  • Department of Biological Science
  • California State University, Fullerton
Jennifer Burnaford studies the effects of environmental stressors and human activity on rocky intertidal communities. She integrates a ‘small-scale’ physiological focus with ‘large-scale’ analysis of species interactions to examine community structure in the present and predict patterns under conditions of global change. Studies in her lab focus on organisms from seaweeds (e.g. how will high intertidal rockweeds respond to sea level rise?) to vertebrates (e.g. how do high temperatures during low tide affect the susceptibility of invertebrate prey items to consumption by birds?).
Lani Gleason

Lani Gleason

  • Assistant Professor
  • Department of Biological Sciences
  • California State University, Sacramento
Lani Gleason investigates how changes in gene sequence and expression generate patterns of differentiation in marine organisms.  She is especially interested in how environmental conditions, such as heat stress, affect these patterns of differentiation in mollusks such as the black turban snail Chlorostoma funebralis, the red abalone Haliotis rufescens, and the intertidal mussel Mytilus californianus.  She integrates next-generation sequencing techniques with phenotypic assays to interpret large genomic datasets from a functional perspective.  This allows her to make connections across levels of organization, from molecular interactions to organismal performance. 
Mackenzie Zippay

Mackenzie Zippay

  • Associate Professor
  • Department of Biology
  • Sonoma State University
Mackenzie Zippay's research interests focus on the comparative and molecular physiology of marine invertebrates that inhabit dynamic environments. Much of her work has centered on understanding how variation in the natural environment translates to an organism’s physiological performance by coupling molecular, cellular and biochemical processes in an ecological context.
Nathan Rank

Nathan E. Rank

  • Professor
  • Department of Biology
  • Sonoma State University
Nathan Rank is interested in the evolutionary ecology of natural populations of insects and how insect populations respond to changing environments. He currently studies the genetic and physiological responses to elevation and temperature for montane populations of the leaf beetle Chrysomela aeneicollis in eastern California. This work involves field and laboratory research in the summer and genomic and transcriptomic analyses during the academic year. He has always been interested in coevolution and has investigated interactions between plants, herbivores and pathogens, and between insects and components of their microbiome. He collaborates with researchers at Santa Clara University and the University of California, Berkeley. His work was featured in the UC-produced documentary 'In the Shadow of White Mountain.'
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