PEOPLE
PI
|
David MillerI work with a variety of questions and taxa - all with a general focus on better understanding the population and community dynamics of wildlife species. My research focuses on matching quantitative tools and ecological understanding to better understand how species will respond to environmental change.
contact: dxm84 at psu.edu |
Post Docs
Dr. Riley BernardRiley Bernard joined the lab in January 2017 as a Penn State post-doc working closely with USGS Northeast Amphibian Research and Monitoring Initiative. Prior to joining the lab, Riley was a post-doc with the University of Tennessee and Great Smoky Mountains National Park and worked on creating an action plan for the endangered Indiana bat and recently listed northern long-eared bat. Her current work focuses on using Structured Decision Making (SDM) to help inform State, Federal and Provincial management agencies on how to implement proactive management decisions to combat emerging wildlife diseases such as white-nose syndrome (WNS) and salamander chytrid fungus (Bsal). Check out her personal website to learn more.
|
|
|
Dr. Brittany MosherBrittany is an applied ecologist who enjoys finding the right quantitative tools to help answer questions in conservation ecology. Her Ph.D. work at Colorado State University focused on understanding the disease dynamics of boreal toads and chytrid fungus in the southern Rocky Mountains, with the goal of informing conservation efforts. Brittany's postdoctoral work at Penn State is in collaboration with the US Geological Survey's Amphibian Research and Monitoring Initiative, and spans a variety of amphibian taxa, threats, and regions. You can learn more about Brittany's work at brittany-a-mosher.strikingly.com.
|
Dr. Beth ReinkeBeth Reinke is interested in the intersections of physiology, ecology, and evolution. Her work before Penn State investigated the non-signaling functions of pigments, and used diverse approaches including visual modeling, field experiments, macroevolutionary analyses, and novel measures of oxidative stress. She began and maintains a long-term study on painted turtles in northern Wisconsin that is in it's ninth year of data collection. Her current work as a postdoc uses quantitative approaches to estimate senescence and growth in populations of turtles and snakes with the goal of addressing comparative evolutionary questions at multiple levels (physiological, organismal, and population-level).
Learn more about her work here: www.bethreinke.com |
|
Graduate Students
|
Staci Amburgey - Ecology PhD studentStaci comes from Colorado where she did her M.S. work at Colorado State University on how hydro-variability and developmental plasticity interact to affect frog populations. She is broadly interested in understanding factors regulating species ranges, within-range variability in species responses, the role of plasticity in mediating ecological responses to abiotic conditions and community interactions, and the responses of wetland communities to climate change. She is funded in part by the USGS Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesis, where she is affiliated with the amphibian decline working group.
Learn more about Staci at her personal website. |
Courtney Davis - Ecology PhD studentCourtney's interests focus on the integration of math and ecology. She is applying her passion for quantitative ecology to examine the effects of climatic variability on the structure of pond breeding amphibian communities. Her work examines how physical environment and species traits modify responses of individual species to hydrologic variation. For the past two years she has been working closely with researchers at St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in Florida to develop multi-state models that incorporate habitat, amphibian, and fish dynamics to examine how drought and flooding has affected amphibians on the refuge.
|
|
|
Carli Dinsmore - Ecology MS studentCarli is a masters student in the Ecology program and receives support both from the Dept of Ecosystem Science and Management and PSU's Shaver's Creek Environmental Center. Carli is working on two projects, the first looking at demographic effects of climatic variability on snake populations in California and the second looking at movement behavior of wood turtles in PSU's Stone Valley Forest.
|
David Muñoz - Ecology PhD studentDavid's research focuses on understanding the demographic and behavioral underpinnings of climate effects on terrestrial salamanders. His research includes conducting capture mark-recapture surveys on Red-backed salamanders in Pennsylvania as part of SPARCNet, a regional population monitoring network that assesses drivers of population dynamics and climate adaptation.
Check out David's blog. |
|
|
Asia Murphy - Ecology PhD studentAsia, who is co-advised by Dr. Duane Diefenbach, will be examining how the distributions of big, bad carnivores on the landscape influences where adorable white-tailed deer fawns are killed. Research interests are tropical rainforest biodiversity hotspots, interspecific interactions, and the population ecology of any species that can be camera-trapped (especially carnivores). Other interests include: photography, xenomorphs, writing, knives, and Pokemon.
Check out her website (anatiala.com) or tweet her hello @am_anatiala. |
Vishnupriya Sankararaman - Ecology PhD studentVishnupriya is a PhD student in the interdepartmental Ecology program. Her work focuses on the effects of agro-forestry practices on amphibian community dynamics. Her field work is in the western Ghats of India where she previously work for the Wildlife Conservation Society studying birds and stream dwelling amphibians.
|
|
Lab Alumni
|
Kim Serno - M.S. Fall 2017Kim started in January 2015 as part of the PA Forest Birds Project. She was co-advised with Dr. Margaret Brittingham and as part of the project looked at road effects across avian communities in north central PA. She began a PhD project at Baylor University in the fall of 2018
|
Matt Toenies - M.S. Fall 2017Matt is passionate about birds and brought that interest to Penn State where he is working on a project examining forest bird communities in the National Park Service - Eastern Mountains and Rivers Network. His work focused on understanding the effects of hemlock die-offs on forest birds communities. He is currently living in Barcelona, Spain.
|
|
|
Dr. Thierry Chambert - post-docThierry joined the lab in January 2014 as the USGS Amphibian Research and Monitoring Initiative post-doc. His work centers on development and application of quantitative approaches for the monitoring of amphibian populations. He returned to France in the summer of 2017 to take a position with the CNRS.
|
Dr. Sean Sterrett - post-docStarting in the summer of 2015, Sean was a post-doc at Penn State with an affiliation to our lab. Sean worked on the SPARCNet project and is leading efforts to integrate citizen-science data in ways that promote education while informing our knowledge of salamander distributions and responses to environmental change. He recently moved on to a position at UMass - Amherst. Check out his personal website to learn more about Sean!
|
|
|
Dr. Glenn Stauffer - post-docGlenn joined the lab in 2015 and is working on the PA Forest Bird Project. His work is focused on analyzing community patterns in Pennsylvania birds and linking avian communities to forest management history and current states in state owned lands. He now lives in Wisconsin and is working on monitoring of wolf populations there.
|
Eric Teitsworth - lab managerEric worked with us for 2 years until the spring of 2017 on a number of projects. He now lives in North Carolina. He started a graduate project at NC State in the fall of 2018.
|
|
|
Jerod Skebo - Wildlife Science MS studentJerod is a naturalist at heart and was born and raised in Pennsylvania. His primary interest is in herps, but he is also a wealth of knowledge in birds, plants, and insects. His research focused on the role of interspecific interactions on chytrid fungus spread and drivers of vernal pool amphibian diversity in central PA.
|