Principal Investigator
Nathan J. Sanders
nsanders@utk.edu

CV

Nate is interested in all of the work described on these pages.

Current postdoc
Tara Sackett
Tara comes to us from McGill University where she worked on spider community ecology. At UT, she's planning on looking at how interactions among a variety of leaf litter arthropods affect community structure and ecosystem processes here in the southern Appalachians and in northern North America.
Current graduate students
Jarrod Blue, MS student
jjblue3@utk.edu


Jarrod is interested in the effects of fertilization and insect herbivores on plant community structure. His undergraduate work at Davidson College worked to test the model of species sorting and mass effects within treehole communities.

Jean-Philippe Lessard, PhD candidate
jlessard@utk.edu

JP is finishing the 2nd year of his PhD on ant community ecology and biogeography. JP's research will adopt a phylogenetic approach to the study of community assembly and biological invasion processes.

Mariano Rodriguez-Cabal, PhD student

Mariano's research focuses on the study of plant-animal interactions, especially mutualisms involving seed dispersal by frugivorous vertebrates.He is especially interested in the causes and consequences of the disruption of plant-animal interactions due to anthropogenic disturbance and/or exotic species in the temperate forests of Patagonia, Argentina.
Katie Stuble, PhD student
klstuble@gmail.com

Katie's interested in how global warming will mediate the effects of ants on ecosystem processes. Her Masters thesis (at UGA) was on the effects of Solenopsis invicta on native ant communities and seed dispersal.
Undergraduates

David Folwer
David is interested in niche partitioning in forest ant communities. He's working entirely in and around the Smokies this summer.

 

 
Jeramy Webb
Jeramy is working on the foraging behavior of Formica subsericea at Coweeta and in the Smokies.
Former graduate students

Greg Crutsinger, PhD 2009
crutsinger@berkeley.edu

Greg's research focused on the community- and ecosystem-level consequences of hostplant population genetic diversity in Solidago altissima and linkages across surf and turf boundaries. Greg is now a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.

Maggie Patrick, MS 2008
mpatric4@utk.edu

Maggie's thesis was on ant communities in treefall gaps in Costa Rica. She's now a PhD student in Geography at UTK.

Lara Souza, PhD 2008
lsouza@utk.edu

Lara's dissertation research focused on community invasibility and the controls on invasion in old field ecosystems. She's now working on a suite of projects in plant ecology and global change ecology at ORNL and at UTK.
Windy Bunn, MS 2008
wbunn@utk.edu

Windy's thesis work focused on the temporal and spatial dynamics of forest communities in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. She's now a fire ecologist at Grand Canyon National Park.

Matt Fitzpatrick, PhD 2008
mfitz2@utk.edu

Matt studied broad-scale distributions of invasive ant species, how dispersal by ants affects patterns of plant diversity, and other interesting problems in invasion biology, and macroecology. He is now a postdoc at Harvard Forest.

Kristin Lane , MA 2006
kristinlane2@yahoo.com


Kristin studied the combined and interactive effects of soil nutrient additions and plant invasions on insect communities.

Jaime Ratchford, MA 2005
jsr8@humboldt.edu


Jaime studied ant community structure and reassembly in Darlintoina fens and adjacent forests. She currently works at Oregon State University.

Former Undergraduates
Claire Brown
Claire worked with WIndy in the Smokies, spending time in the backcountry and examing spatial and temporal variation in plant community structure. Her undergrad work resulted in one publication in Ecography with Windy.
Audry Hite
Audry spent the summer in Idaho, another summer in Florida, and and the academic year in the lab sorting arthropod specimens from the Smokies.
Andrew Johns
Andrew's spent the past two summers working the Smokies on ant community ecology. When he grows up, he wants to be a dentist. But his true love will always be the insects in the Smokies.
Nancy Bennett
Nancy is preparing to attend Vet school.
Chris Burgess
Chris worked with JP on a project looking at how resources and temperature interact to affect leaf litter arthropods in the Smokies.
Kerri Crawford
Kerri did her undergraduate Honors Thesis with us (mostly with Greg Crutsinger). This past summer, she did her field work on the causes and consequences of galling in Solidago altissima. Kerri is off to Rice University next year to pursue her PhD.
Mark Genung
Mark is going to start in the Masters program here at UT, working with Joe Bailey and Jen Schweitzer.
Dana Glore
Dana is going to Physician's Assistant school here in Tennessee.
Melissa Habenicht
Melissa is starting to think about grad school in ecology. She spent the summer doing restoration ecology in the wild mountains of Idaho.
Jessica Hite
Jessica is now in grad school at Indiana University where's she's working on predator-prey interactions in the tropics.
Raynelle Rino
Raynelle did her undergraduate research at Humboldt State Univesity on the foraging behavior of Formica obscuripes. She also has worked with us on leaf litter ant diversity in the Smokies. Raynelle is going to be a graduate student at San Francisco State University.
Matt Lau
Matt did his undergraduate research at Humboldt State on a variety of topics. He's now a graduate student at Northern Arizona University.
Sheilah Lillie
Sheilah did her undergraduate research at Humboldt State on the plant communities in Darlingtonia fens and adjacent upland habitats. She's now a graduate student at Humboldt State University.

Melissa Geraghty
Melissa (on the left) worked on the mesoecology of ants of the southern Appalachians and aquatic insects of the southeastern US.


Former Postdoc
Rob Dunn
rrdunn@ncsu.edu

Rob is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Zoology at North Carolina State University.
Back to the front page