We combine observational data with statistical modeling approaches to investigate questions at the interface of ecology and conservation. The primary goals of our research are to identify mechanisms that structure tropical mammal communities over space and time and understand how tropical mammals respond to past, present, and future global change.
Community and MacroecologyWe study the drivers of variation in ecological communities over space and time with an emphasis on tropical mammals.
(Photo: Tim Laman) |
Global Change BiologyHabitat loss, illegal hunting, and climate change are three of the most critical threats to biodiversity worldwide. We study how these aspects of global change affect tropical wildlife.
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Conservation BiologyWe conduct research in collaboration with TEAM, a global tropical biodiversity monitoring network.
(Photo: Benjamin Drummond) |
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Statement of support for inclusiveness and diversity As a lab we express solidarity with MSU's Office of Civil Rights to contribute to a safe, inclusive and equitable campus community by working to combat discrimination and inequality, which not only permeate our society but occur in academia as well. Although we recognize we have substantial work to do, we are firmly committed to work towards university goals of expanding and supporting diversity and fostering inclusiveness in our lab. We recognize and celebrate the contributions of diverse perspectives, ideas and backgrounds in all our endeavors. We commit ourselves to creating welcoming, safe spaces and we invite feedback and conversations so that we can continue to do better. Our lab policies are available here. |
Lab News!
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February 2025: BIG paper led by former lab visiting scholar Ilaria Greco published in Plos Biology!! It's entitled "Landscape-level human disturbance results in loss and contraction of mammalian populations in tropical forests". Previous PhD students in the lab - Chia and Dan - made critical contributions to the paper by providing covariate data. Lydia worked super hard to support the conceptualization, development, writing, and revision of the paper because Ilaria's work is so important for conservation. Check out the press release from Plos Biology and the press release from MSU. |
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January 2025: Lydia visits the University of Toronto to give an invited seminar for the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology.
Welcome to the lab, Irina! We are so thrilled you are here!
December 2024: Huge congratulations to Ilaria Greco on her gargantuan effort resulting in acceptance of her paper to Plos Biology!! The paper is entitled "Landscape-level human disturbance results in loss and contraction of mammal populations in tropical forests". Ilaria was a visiting scholar in our lab in 2022. Both Chia and Dan contributed to the large collaboration Ilaria spearheaded.
November 2024: Lydia gives an invited lightning talk for the AI & the Environment event hosted by MSU's Office of Research and Innovation. The talk was entitled "AI for Biodiversity: Past, Present, and Future".
October 2024: New paper led by Richard Bischof published in Proceedings B from our Empty Forests and Extinction Filters project. The paper is entitled "The moon's influence on the activity of tropical forest mammals" and news coverage is here!
September 2024: Macrobehavior working group selected for funding by the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv)! Katie Marske and Sally Keith led the proposal and Lydia is thrilled to participate in it!
Lab dinner at Lydia's house!
August 2024: Fall semester starts and we kick off joint lab meetings with Phoebe Zarnetske's SPaCE Lab!
July 2024: Congratulations to Dr. Chia Hsieh on the successful defense of her PhD thesis entitled "Evolutionary history, extinction, and environmental variability shape the tropical and subtropical diversity disparity of terrestrial mammals"!
New paper led by John Rowan out in Nature Ecology & Evolution entitled "Long-term biotic homogenization in the East African Rift System over the last 6 million years of hominin evolution" funded by the NSF Biological Anthropology grant to Jason Kamilar and Kaye Reed that Lydia contributed to.
The lab gets started at Michigan State University with new members Miguel Silva and Matthew Wuensch! We are so glad to finally be here!
June 2024: Welcome to the lab, Matthew Wuensch and Irina Birskis-Barros! We are so thrilled that each of you are joining the group as postdocs at MSU this year! Matt starts in July and Irina will start in January 2025.
May 2024: Final lab dinner at Lydia's house for our research group at Rice University with amazing culinary selections by Chia!
April 2024: Welcome to the lab, Corrina Tapia! We are thrilled that Corrina has accepted an offer to join the lab as a PhD student in Integrative Biology at Michigan State University for next academic year!
Congratulations to Annie on receiving the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship as a second year PhD student!!
Congratulations to Chia on accepting the very prestigious independent Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at Michigan State University where she will work with Elise Zipkin and Fredric Janzen!!
March 2024: Lydia's article entitled "Geographic differences in body size distributions underlie food web structure of tropical forest mammals" is published in Scientific Reports!
Congratulations to Chia on the publication of her paper in Global Ecology and Biogeography entitled "Evolutionary history and environmental variability structure contemporary tropical vertebrate communities"!
We are recruiting! Check out our postdoc job ad and spread the word!
Congratulations to Annie on winning a university-wide teaching award - the Graduate Teaching Award for Student Support - from the Center for Excellence in Teaching!
February 2024: Welcome to the lab, Miguel Silva! We are thrilled that Miguel has accepted an offer to join the lab as a PhD student in Integrative Biology at Michigan State University for next academic year!
Lydia is quoted in The Washington Post about the geometry of protected areas and how it relates to Asun's results in Nature Ecology & Evolution!
Lydia and Annie present at the Virtual Macrosystems Biology Community Meeting
January 2024: Lydia and Chia travel to Prague, Czech Republic to give talks at the biennial International Biogeography Society conference!
December 2023: Congratulations to Dan on the publication of his manuscript and final dissertation chapter "Tropical forest mammal occupancy and functional diversity increase with microhabitat surface area" in Ecology! Check out the press release here! AND Dan's photo of a red colobus monkey is the cover image for the December 2023 Ecology issue!
November 2023: Congratulations to our lab alumnus, Dr. Dan Gorczynski, on starting his exciting new postdoc position at the University of Montana with Dr. Jedediah Brodie and other faculty!
September 2023: Welcome to the lab, Mallory Tucker! We are so glad Mallory is taking undergraduate research credits to work with Annie on the relationship between fragmentation and plant productivity as a part of our NSF African food web research.
August 2023: Lydia, Chia, and Annie present at the Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon!
July 2023: Lydia, Dan, and Annie present at the International Congress on Conservation Biology in Kigali, Rwanda! What an amazing time we had visiting Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda and Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda - both locations where TEAM camera trap data have been collected for many years!
Congratulations to Dr. Dan Gorczynski on the highly successful defense of his dissertation entitled "The functional side of diversity: Effects of environmental conditions and human disturbance on tropical forest mammal communities"!
June 2023: Congratulations to Asun on the publication of her manuscript "Occurrence dynamics of mammals in protected tropical forests respond to human presence and activities" at Nature Ecology & Evolution! Check out news coverage by The Guardian, and Phys.org, as well as a Research Briefing entitled Humans influence mammal populations even inside protected areas in Nature Ecology & Evolution. Asun's work including this terrific paper has been funded by a grant from the Research Council of Norway on which Lydia is a Co-PI.
Lab breakfast at Snooze!
Welcome to the lab, Patricia! We are so glad Patricia Juarez is here with us from Spring ISD for her RET internship!
May 2023: Congratulations to Dan on receiving a $1000 travel award from the Institute for Biosciences and Bioengineering to give an oral presentation at the International Congress on Conservation Biology in Rwanda this summer!
Congratulations to Annie for receiving a $5000 Lewis and Clark Grant for Exploration and Field Research! Check out Annie's new website too!
Congratulations to Dan, Annie, and Chia for receiving Biosciences travel awards to attend conferences this summer!
Congratulations to Annie on received the 2023 Peter Savvas Nelson Award for Outstanding Community Citizenship!
April 2023: Annie travels to Costa Rica for her field season at La Selva!
Celebratory lab lunch at Sixty Vines!
Manuscript led by Julia Saltz entitled "Identifying the social context of single- and mixed-species group formation in large African grazers" published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B! The article is part of the theme issue ‘Mixed-species groups and aggregations: shaping ecological and behavioural patterns and processes’. This paper is a super neat extension of the Serengeti mixed-species group paper testing the stress gradient hypothesis that Lydia published in 2020 with Meredith Palmer.
Lydia gives a seminar in the Integrative Biology Department at Michigan State University entitled "Historical and contemporary changes in mammal community structure".
Lydia gives a student invited seminar at the University of Michigan in the Department of Anthropology entitled "Historical and contemporary anthropogenic effects on mammal communities".
March 2023: Congratulations to Chia on receiving THE Graduate Student Teaching Award for Course Support from the Rice University Center for Teaching Excellence for 2022 for her outstanding work as a TA for BIOS 338/538: Analysis & Visualization of Biological Data!
Congratulation to Annie on receiving the Expanding Horizons Fellowship! The $4000 Annie received will go towards her summer field work in Costa Rica based out of La Selva where TEAM has collected long term camera trap data along the Volcan Barva transect.
February 2023: Lydia gives a seminar in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University entitled "Past and present human impacts on tropical forest mammals".
January 2023: Lydia gives a seminar in the Faculty of Science at the University of Calgary entitled "Applied data science for tropical ecology and conservation".
Lydia gives a seminar in the College of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech entitled "Past and present human impacts on tropical forest mammals".
December 2022: Tropical Ecology & Conservation group dinner at Rim Tannon!
November 2022: Congratulations to Andrea on the publication of her manuscript "Consistent diel activity patterns of forest mammals among tropical regions" in Nature Communications! Check out media coverage here and here!
Lydia joins the Editorial Board at Ecological Monographs as a Subject-matter Editor!
Lydia gives an invited seminar at the University of Calgary entitled "Ecology and conservation of primates and other protected tropical mammals" and had a terrific time visiting with faculty and students!
October 2022: Tropical Ecology & Conservation lab dinner at Lydia's!
Andrea Vallejo Vargas and Asuncion Semper Pascual arrive from Norway to join our lab as a visiting scholars! Andrea is a PhD student and Asun is a postdoc on the Empty Forests and Extinction Filters project, which is funded through the Research Council of Norway and led by Richard Bischof (PI), Douglas Sheil (Co-PI) and Lydia (Co-PI). Welcome, Andrea and Asun, we are so glad you are here!
September 2022: Dan's paper "Human density modulates spatial associations among tropical forest terrestrial mammal species" has been published at Global Change Biology. Congratulations, Dan!
August 2022: New paper published in Science entitled "Collapse of terrestrial mammal food webs since the late Pleistocene". Check out press coverage here and perspective piece here! Evan Fricke, former EEB Faculty Fellow at Rice, led the paper with contributions from Chia and Dan as coauthors and Lydia as the senior author.
The lab goes to ESA in Montreal! Lydia, Dan, and Chia give oral presentations and Kristin presents a poster.
Chia and Lydia host their organized oral session at ESA on the "Macroecology of trophic interactions in a changing world" with a terrific group of speakers: Laura Pollock, Amy Freestone, Alex Moore, Ulrich Brose, and Daniel Stouffer!
Lab dinner to kick off the new year at Lydia's house!
Annie arrives in Houston and at Rice! Welcome to the lab, Annie!
July 2022: Lydia is awarded an NSF grant from the Macrosystems Biology and NEON-Enabled Science program as the principle investigator! The project is entitled "Quantifying the drivers of mammal food web networks over space and time in Sub-Saharan Africa" and is in collaboration with Cesar Uribe from Electrical and Computer Engineering. Annie Finneran will join the lab for her PhD as part of our team!
Congratulations to Dan on the publication of his manuscript "Measuring understory vegetation structure using a novel mixed-reality device" at Methods in Ecology and Evolution! Check out press coverage here!
New paper out in Proceedings B entitled "Occupancy winners in tropical protected areas: a pantropical analysis" led by Asuncion Semper-Pascual, who is a postdoc on the Empty Forests and Extinction Filters grant from the Research Council on Norway that Lydia is a Co-PI on with Douglas Sheil (PI) and Richard Bischof (Co-PI). Asun will be visiting our lab this fall along with Andrea Vallejo-Vargas, who is a PhD student on the grant. We are looking forward to their time at Rice!
June 2022: Congratulations to Chia on winning the Joe Davies Prize for Outstanding Service as a Teaching Assistant for her terrific work in BIOS 338/538 this spring semester!
Chia presents her first dissertation chapter at the International Biogeography Society meeting in Vancouver, Canada!
May 2022: Annie Finneran accepts the offer to join our lab and the EEB PhD program in the fall! Welcome to the lab, Annie, we are thrilled you are joining us!
Congratulations to Dan on receiving a Vaughn Fellowship from the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies! This award is given annually to a very limited number of Rice graduate students who have demonstrated outstanding achievement and promise.
Congratulations to Chia on receiving the top travel award from the Institute for Biosciences and Bioengineering!
Tropical Ecology & Conservation group dinner at Lydia's house!
Congratulations to Dan on receiving a conference travel award from the Biosciences Department
April 2022: Congratulations to Chia on successfully defending her dissertation proposal and passing her qualifying exam!
March 2022: Lydia is awarded an internal grant from the Rice University Faculty Initiative Fund in collaboration with Amy Dunham and Meng Li! The research is entitled "Identifying the environmental drivers of tropical wildlife diversity".
February 2022: Lydia gives an invited (virtual) seminar for Texas Tech's Department of Natural Resource Management.
Lydia is awarded an internal grant from the Rice University Sustainable Futures Fund in collaboration with Cesar Uribe from Electrical and Computer Engineering! The research is entitled 'Identifying anthropogenic impacts on tropical wildlife through multi-scale and multi-modal network ecology using graph matching and alignmnent'.
Historic announcement from the President and Provost of Rice University about commitments to environmental sustainability through the Rice's endowment, campus operations, fundraising, and research!
Farewell to our visiting student Ilaria Greco as she returns to Italy. It was wonderful having you here!
January 2022: The organized oral session for ESA 2022 in Montreal that Chia and Lydia put together has been accepted! The session is entitled "Macroecology of trophic interactions in a changing work" and has six featured speakers who will be joining us from the US, Canada, Europe and New Zealand.
Sarah Yao, an undergraduate computer science major, joins the lab group for the semester!
Welcome to the lab, Irina! We are so thrilled you are here!
December 2024: Huge congratulations to Ilaria Greco on her gargantuan effort resulting in acceptance of her paper to Plos Biology!! The paper is entitled "Landscape-level human disturbance results in loss and contraction of mammal populations in tropical forests". Ilaria was a visiting scholar in our lab in 2022. Both Chia and Dan contributed to the large collaboration Ilaria spearheaded.
November 2024: Lydia gives an invited lightning talk for the AI & the Environment event hosted by MSU's Office of Research and Innovation. The talk was entitled "AI for Biodiversity: Past, Present, and Future".
October 2024: New paper led by Richard Bischof published in Proceedings B from our Empty Forests and Extinction Filters project. The paper is entitled "The moon's influence on the activity of tropical forest mammals" and news coverage is here!
September 2024: Macrobehavior working group selected for funding by the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv)! Katie Marske and Sally Keith led the proposal and Lydia is thrilled to participate in it!
Lab dinner at Lydia's house!
August 2024: Fall semester starts and we kick off joint lab meetings with Phoebe Zarnetske's SPaCE Lab!
July 2024: Congratulations to Dr. Chia Hsieh on the successful defense of her PhD thesis entitled "Evolutionary history, extinction, and environmental variability shape the tropical and subtropical diversity disparity of terrestrial mammals"!
New paper led by John Rowan out in Nature Ecology & Evolution entitled "Long-term biotic homogenization in the East African Rift System over the last 6 million years of hominin evolution" funded by the NSF Biological Anthropology grant to Jason Kamilar and Kaye Reed that Lydia contributed to.
The lab gets started at Michigan State University with new members Miguel Silva and Matthew Wuensch! We are so glad to finally be here!
June 2024: Welcome to the lab, Matthew Wuensch and Irina Birskis-Barros! We are so thrilled that each of you are joining the group as postdocs at MSU this year! Matt starts in July and Irina will start in January 2025.
May 2024: Final lab dinner at Lydia's house for our research group at Rice University with amazing culinary selections by Chia!
April 2024: Welcome to the lab, Corrina Tapia! We are thrilled that Corrina has accepted an offer to join the lab as a PhD student in Integrative Biology at Michigan State University for next academic year!
Congratulations to Annie on receiving the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship as a second year PhD student!!
Congratulations to Chia on accepting the very prestigious independent Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at Michigan State University where she will work with Elise Zipkin and Fredric Janzen!!
March 2024: Lydia's article entitled "Geographic differences in body size distributions underlie food web structure of tropical forest mammals" is published in Scientific Reports!
Congratulations to Chia on the publication of her paper in Global Ecology and Biogeography entitled "Evolutionary history and environmental variability structure contemporary tropical vertebrate communities"!
We are recruiting! Check out our postdoc job ad and spread the word!
Congratulations to Annie on winning a university-wide teaching award - the Graduate Teaching Award for Student Support - from the Center for Excellence in Teaching!
February 2024: Welcome to the lab, Miguel Silva! We are thrilled that Miguel has accepted an offer to join the lab as a PhD student in Integrative Biology at Michigan State University for next academic year!
Lydia is quoted in The Washington Post about the geometry of protected areas and how it relates to Asun's results in Nature Ecology & Evolution!
Lydia and Annie present at the Virtual Macrosystems Biology Community Meeting
January 2024: Lydia and Chia travel to Prague, Czech Republic to give talks at the biennial International Biogeography Society conference!
December 2023: Congratulations to Dan on the publication of his manuscript and final dissertation chapter "Tropical forest mammal occupancy and functional diversity increase with microhabitat surface area" in Ecology! Check out the press release here! AND Dan's photo of a red colobus monkey is the cover image for the December 2023 Ecology issue!
November 2023: Congratulations to our lab alumnus, Dr. Dan Gorczynski, on starting his exciting new postdoc position at the University of Montana with Dr. Jedediah Brodie and other faculty!
September 2023: Welcome to the lab, Mallory Tucker! We are so glad Mallory is taking undergraduate research credits to work with Annie on the relationship between fragmentation and plant productivity as a part of our NSF African food web research.
August 2023: Lydia, Chia, and Annie present at the Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon!
July 2023: Lydia, Dan, and Annie present at the International Congress on Conservation Biology in Kigali, Rwanda! What an amazing time we had visiting Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda and Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda - both locations where TEAM camera trap data have been collected for many years!
Congratulations to Dr. Dan Gorczynski on the highly successful defense of his dissertation entitled "The functional side of diversity: Effects of environmental conditions and human disturbance on tropical forest mammal communities"!
June 2023: Congratulations to Asun on the publication of her manuscript "Occurrence dynamics of mammals in protected tropical forests respond to human presence and activities" at Nature Ecology & Evolution! Check out news coverage by The Guardian, and Phys.org, as well as a Research Briefing entitled Humans influence mammal populations even inside protected areas in Nature Ecology & Evolution. Asun's work including this terrific paper has been funded by a grant from the Research Council of Norway on which Lydia is a Co-PI.
Lab breakfast at Snooze!
Welcome to the lab, Patricia! We are so glad Patricia Juarez is here with us from Spring ISD for her RET internship!
May 2023: Congratulations to Dan on receiving a $1000 travel award from the Institute for Biosciences and Bioengineering to give an oral presentation at the International Congress on Conservation Biology in Rwanda this summer!
Congratulations to Annie for receiving a $5000 Lewis and Clark Grant for Exploration and Field Research! Check out Annie's new website too!
Congratulations to Dan, Annie, and Chia for receiving Biosciences travel awards to attend conferences this summer!
Congratulations to Annie on received the 2023 Peter Savvas Nelson Award for Outstanding Community Citizenship!
April 2023: Annie travels to Costa Rica for her field season at La Selva!
Celebratory lab lunch at Sixty Vines!
Manuscript led by Julia Saltz entitled "Identifying the social context of single- and mixed-species group formation in large African grazers" published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B! The article is part of the theme issue ‘Mixed-species groups and aggregations: shaping ecological and behavioural patterns and processes’. This paper is a super neat extension of the Serengeti mixed-species group paper testing the stress gradient hypothesis that Lydia published in 2020 with Meredith Palmer.
Lydia gives a seminar in the Integrative Biology Department at Michigan State University entitled "Historical and contemporary changes in mammal community structure".
Lydia gives a student invited seminar at the University of Michigan in the Department of Anthropology entitled "Historical and contemporary anthropogenic effects on mammal communities".
March 2023: Congratulations to Chia on receiving THE Graduate Student Teaching Award for Course Support from the Rice University Center for Teaching Excellence for 2022 for her outstanding work as a TA for BIOS 338/538: Analysis & Visualization of Biological Data!
Congratulation to Annie on receiving the Expanding Horizons Fellowship! The $4000 Annie received will go towards her summer field work in Costa Rica based out of La Selva where TEAM has collected long term camera trap data along the Volcan Barva transect.
February 2023: Lydia gives a seminar in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University entitled "Past and present human impacts on tropical forest mammals".
January 2023: Lydia gives a seminar in the Faculty of Science at the University of Calgary entitled "Applied data science for tropical ecology and conservation".
Lydia gives a seminar in the College of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech entitled "Past and present human impacts on tropical forest mammals".
December 2022: Tropical Ecology & Conservation group dinner at Rim Tannon!
November 2022: Congratulations to Andrea on the publication of her manuscript "Consistent diel activity patterns of forest mammals among tropical regions" in Nature Communications! Check out media coverage here and here!
Lydia joins the Editorial Board at Ecological Monographs as a Subject-matter Editor!
Lydia gives an invited seminar at the University of Calgary entitled "Ecology and conservation of primates and other protected tropical mammals" and had a terrific time visiting with faculty and students!
October 2022: Tropical Ecology & Conservation lab dinner at Lydia's!
Andrea Vallejo Vargas and Asuncion Semper Pascual arrive from Norway to join our lab as a visiting scholars! Andrea is a PhD student and Asun is a postdoc on the Empty Forests and Extinction Filters project, which is funded through the Research Council of Norway and led by Richard Bischof (PI), Douglas Sheil (Co-PI) and Lydia (Co-PI). Welcome, Andrea and Asun, we are so glad you are here!
September 2022: Dan's paper "Human density modulates spatial associations among tropical forest terrestrial mammal species" has been published at Global Change Biology. Congratulations, Dan!
August 2022: New paper published in Science entitled "Collapse of terrestrial mammal food webs since the late Pleistocene". Check out press coverage here and perspective piece here! Evan Fricke, former EEB Faculty Fellow at Rice, led the paper with contributions from Chia and Dan as coauthors and Lydia as the senior author.
The lab goes to ESA in Montreal! Lydia, Dan, and Chia give oral presentations and Kristin presents a poster.
Chia and Lydia host their organized oral session at ESA on the "Macroecology of trophic interactions in a changing world" with a terrific group of speakers: Laura Pollock, Amy Freestone, Alex Moore, Ulrich Brose, and Daniel Stouffer!
Lab dinner to kick off the new year at Lydia's house!
Annie arrives in Houston and at Rice! Welcome to the lab, Annie!
July 2022: Lydia is awarded an NSF grant from the Macrosystems Biology and NEON-Enabled Science program as the principle investigator! The project is entitled "Quantifying the drivers of mammal food web networks over space and time in Sub-Saharan Africa" and is in collaboration with Cesar Uribe from Electrical and Computer Engineering. Annie Finneran will join the lab for her PhD as part of our team!
Congratulations to Dan on the publication of his manuscript "Measuring understory vegetation structure using a novel mixed-reality device" at Methods in Ecology and Evolution! Check out press coverage here!
New paper out in Proceedings B entitled "Occupancy winners in tropical protected areas: a pantropical analysis" led by Asuncion Semper-Pascual, who is a postdoc on the Empty Forests and Extinction Filters grant from the Research Council on Norway that Lydia is a Co-PI on with Douglas Sheil (PI) and Richard Bischof (Co-PI). Asun will be visiting our lab this fall along with Andrea Vallejo-Vargas, who is a PhD student on the grant. We are looking forward to their time at Rice!
June 2022: Congratulations to Chia on winning the Joe Davies Prize for Outstanding Service as a Teaching Assistant for her terrific work in BIOS 338/538 this spring semester!
Chia presents her first dissertation chapter at the International Biogeography Society meeting in Vancouver, Canada!
May 2022: Annie Finneran accepts the offer to join our lab and the EEB PhD program in the fall! Welcome to the lab, Annie, we are thrilled you are joining us!
Congratulations to Dan on receiving a Vaughn Fellowship from the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies! This award is given annually to a very limited number of Rice graduate students who have demonstrated outstanding achievement and promise.
Congratulations to Chia on receiving the top travel award from the Institute for Biosciences and Bioengineering!
Tropical Ecology & Conservation group dinner at Lydia's house!
Congratulations to Dan on receiving a conference travel award from the Biosciences Department
April 2022: Congratulations to Chia on successfully defending her dissertation proposal and passing her qualifying exam!
March 2022: Lydia is awarded an internal grant from the Rice University Faculty Initiative Fund in collaboration with Amy Dunham and Meng Li! The research is entitled "Identifying the environmental drivers of tropical wildlife diversity".
February 2022: Lydia gives an invited (virtual) seminar for Texas Tech's Department of Natural Resource Management.
Lydia is awarded an internal grant from the Rice University Sustainable Futures Fund in collaboration with Cesar Uribe from Electrical and Computer Engineering! The research is entitled 'Identifying anthropogenic impacts on tropical wildlife through multi-scale and multi-modal network ecology using graph matching and alignmnent'.
Historic announcement from the President and Provost of Rice University about commitments to environmental sustainability through the Rice's endowment, campus operations, fundraising, and research!
Farewell to our visiting student Ilaria Greco as she returns to Italy. It was wonderful having you here!
January 2022: The organized oral session for ESA 2022 in Montreal that Chia and Lydia put together has been accepted! The session is entitled "Macroecology of trophic interactions in a changing work" and has six featured speakers who will be joining us from the US, Canada, Europe and New Zealand.
Sarah Yao, an undergraduate computer science major, joins the lab group for the semester!
Check out previous lab news in our News Archives
