nsanders@utk.edu
CV
Nate is interested in all of the work described on these pages.
Melissa Burt, PhD student
melissa.ann.burt@gmail.com
Melissa is a 2nd yr PhD student interested in how plant-animal interactions (herbivory, pollination, seed predation, etc) are affected by global change (warming, invasion by non-natives, etc).
Lacy Danikas Chick, PhD student
lndanikas@gmail.com
Lacy is starting her 2nd year in the PhD program. Her M.S. degree is from Middle Tennessee State University where she addressed the thermal physiology and variation in locomotor performance of the Northern Watersnake. Her current research interests center on the relationship between thermal physiology and broad-scale patterns of diversity.
Quentin Read, PhD student
quentin.read@gmail.com
Quentin is a first year PhD student who is interested in plant community ecology and environmental gradients.
rcabal@utk.edu
Mariano is starting his fourth year in the lab. His 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.
klstuble@gmail.com
Katie is starting her fourth year in the lab. Her PhD is focused on how global warming will mediate the effects of ants on ecosystem processes as part of our ant warming experiment at Duke Forest. Her Masters thesis (at UGA) was on the effects of Solenopsis invicta on native ant communities and seed dispersal.
David Fowler
David is interested in niche partitioning in forest ant communities. He's worked in and around the Smokies and at the Ant Warming site.
Courtney is starting her second year in the lab and is busy setting up some greenhouse experiments on hemiparasitic plants.
Johannah spent the summer at RMBL working on the effects of hemi-parasitic plants on community structure and ecosystem function.
Jean-Philippe Lessard, PhD 2010
jlessard@utk.edu
JP's PhD was on ant community ecology and biogeography. JP's research has adopted a phylogenetic approach to the study of community assembly and biological invasion processes. He leaves in August to start a postdoc at the University of Copenhagen.
jjblue3@utk.edu
Jarrod's thesis focused on 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.
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.
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.
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.
Carissa finished her honors thesis in 2011 on the relationship between body size, resource use, and temperature in ants.
Laura helped with various studies around the Smoky Mountains. She spent the last summer working in an estuarine system at Dauphin Island Sea Lab looking at predator-prey interactions in an experimental food web. She wishes to continue work in ecology working in a marine ecosystem, but the Smoky Mountains will always be home.
Jeramy worked on the foraging behavior of Formica subsericea at Coweeta and in the Smokies.
Jessica worked at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab with Becky irwin on the assemblage structure of solitary bees in three different habitat types.
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 spent the summer in Idaho, another summer in Florida, and and the academic year in the lab sorting arthropod specimens from the Smokies.
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 is preparing to attend Vet school.
Chris worked with JP on a project looking at how resources and temperature interact to affect leaf litter arthropods in the Smokies.
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 is going to start in the Masters program here at UT, working with Joe Bailey and Jen Schweitzer.
Dana is going to Physician's Assistant school here in Tennessee.
Melissa is starting to think about grad school in ecology. She spent the summer doing restoration ecology in the wild mountains of Idaho.
Jessica is now in grad school at Indiana University where's she's working on predator-prey interactions in the tropics.
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 did his undergraduate research at Humboldt State on a variety of topics. He's now a graduate student at Northern Arizona University.
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.
Tara came to us from McGill University where she worked on spider community ecology. At UT, looked 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. Tara is now a postdoc at the University of Toronto.
rrdunn@ncsu.edu
Rob is now an Assistant Professor in the Biology Department at North Carolina State University.
