Faculty

Emily Meineke studies insect-plant interactions under human influence. Her research focuses on species that are of cultural importance, such as street trees, crops, crop wild relatives, and plants that support rare insect species. Her work combines experiments, observations, community science, and biological collections to address key hypotheses in ecology.

Gail Patricelli studies the sounds, smells, colors, dances, electrical fields, and seismic vibrations that animals use to communicate. She addresses the function of these signals and why they take on such diverse and complex forms, using an integrative approach that examines functional, environmental and mechanistic influences on signal content and design. One of the central goals of her research is to understand how signals are influenced by the social and environmental contexts in which they are used. She has pioneered new techniques and technologies for the detailed observation and experimental manipulation of both visual and acoustic signals in the field, including biomimetic robots and microphone arrays.

Rachel Vannette is a community ecologist interested in understanding and predicting how microbial communities influence interactions between plants and insects. She studies microbial communities in flowers, on insects, or in soil by combining natural history observations with techniques from chemical ecology, microbial ecology and community ecology.  Her work includes applied problems with an immediate application, for example pathogen control or how to landscape to support pollinators. Other questions may not have an immediate application but are nonetheless grounded in theory and will contribute to basic knowledge and conservation.

Louie Yang works to develop a temporally explicit view of ecology that examines how ecological communities combine complex, coordinated and changing interactions over time. He's particularly interested in the effects of climate change and global warming on plant-insect interactions.

Santiago Ramírez studies the evolution, adaptation, and speciation of plant-pollinator mutualisms. His work includes comparative and population genomics of bees and their associated host plants, phylogenetics, chemical ecology, neuroethology, and natural history of insect-plant interactions. His research includes the evolutionary biology of the charismatic euglossine bees and the intricate associations they have as pollinators of orchids from the Neotropical Region, and the ecological genetics of native and introduced populations of the economically important honey bee, Apis mellifera.

Jenny Gremer's research focuses on understanding plant responses to variable and changing environments, the mechanisms driving those responses, and the consequences for population and community dynamics. She investigates how species’ traits interact with the environment to affect performance and how those patterns influence population and community dynamics. She uses a combination of physiology and demography to understand processes such as life history evolution, population dynamics, and the maintenance of diversity in communities.

Nann Fangue seeks to understand the physiological specializations that allow animals to survive and thrive in complex environments. She studies aquatic species, including sturgeon and salmonids, to understand whether these organisms have sufficient physiological capacity or plasticity to maintain successful performance in the face of anthropogenic environmental perturbations such as climate change. This research couples molecular, biochemical, physiological, and whole-organism measures of performance framed in an ecological context, to elucidate connections between environment, physiology, and ecosystem function.

Rachael Bay studies interactions between human-induced changes in the environment and evolutionary processes. This includes how animals respond to changes in their environment that are caused by humans as well as how evolution might mitigate some of the negative impacts of human-induced change. She uses a combination of ecological and physiological experiments and large-scale genomic and environmental data to understand patterns of evolution associated with anthropogenic impacts across a wide range of non-model animals. Her work ultimately can be used to create forward-looking conservation management decisions.

Anne Todgham is an environmental physiologist who seeks to understand the molecular, biochemical and physiological mechanisms that underlie an animal’s capacity to cope with environmental change. Her current research program addresses the general question of whether contemporary animals -- mostly California marine and estuarine organisms but also Antarctic fishes -- have the physiological flexibility necessary to buffer the unprecedented rates of environmental change.