We have many things to celebrate!
Izzy received an NSF graduate research fellowship to quantify effects of temperature on the monarch-OE interaction across scales. She is mentoring REU student Maya Sarkar this summer conducting experimental infections at different environmental temperatures.
Cali received funding from the UGA Innovative Interdisciplinary Research Grant (IIRG) and Oconee Rivers Audubon Society for her work on behavior, infection and food subsidy in urban white ibis. Additionally, she successfully applied for an REU supplement to support Olivia Sieverts. She and Olivia are spending the summer in Florida watching ibis.
Megan also received funding from the UGA IIRG and helped write a President’s Interdisciplinary Research Grant to study the transmission of the parasite causing black gill disease in shrimp at the Georgia coast. Megan is spending the summer at the Skidaway Oceanographic Institute developing transmission experiments in the lab and the field.
Claire received funding to pursue an NSF Graduate Internship experience this fall, and has co-authored two recent papers: the first, led my Marlee Tucker and published in Global Ecology and Biogeography, demonstrates that birds move more in uniform landscapes, and the second, led by Drew Kramer and published in Ecology and Evolution, investigates the cross-scale dynamics of White Nose Syndrome transmission.
Richard published a modeling paper in Integrative and Comparative Biology linking resource intake to within-host dynamics and parasite transmission in heterogeneous host populations. He is excited to collaborate on an NSF EEID-funded grant lead by U. Arkansas’ Kris Forbes to investigate helminth-hantavirus transmission in Finnish voles; stay tuned for modeling PhD opportunities. He also got to go to Alaska for the first time and attend his first ornithology meeting!