Karthik is a 3rd year PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology working in the Malhi Lab. His work focuses on dietary, environmental, and social influences on gut microbiomes, specifically in dogs and vampire bats, as proxies for humans.
Category: A Week in the Life
A Week in the Life is a new GEEB initiative designed as a way of getting to know our fellow members. We often see information about our department, lab, and project through official mediums, whether a lab or department website. However, what do GEEB members actually do on an average day? What do they do in their free time? This is what we want to know. Tell other GEEB members what an average day consists of. Let them know about that sweet podcast you like listening to or what your favorite place for lunch is. Do you have an event coming up? Let them know too. Join us and get to know our fellow GEEBers!
A Week in the Life – Jacob Torres
Jacob is a 1st year PhD student in Entomology, working in Adam Dolezal’s Lab. His research focused on factors that may impact pollinator health such as nutrition, pathogens, urbanization, microbiomes, and many others. He currently works on the Honey bee system, but is interested in native bees and pollinators in general.
A Week in the Life – Amanda Owings
Amanda is a 7th year PhD candidate in the Program in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology working in the lab of Ripan Malhi. Her work focuses on assessing the genetic effects of European colonization on a First Nations population in Canada examining both ancient and present-day DNA.
A Week in the Life – Jacob Dixon
Jake is a 3rd year Master’s student in the Entomology Department working in the lab of May Berenbaum. His research looks at the plant compound resveratrol and its effects on the development of three lepidopteran (moth) species.
A Week in the Life – Cecilia Prada
Ceci is a third year PhD student in Plant Biology working in Jim Dalling’s lab. Her research focuses on how abiotic factors, especially soil characteristics, influence plant community distribution and composition in montane tropical forest.
A Week in the Life – Christine Parker
Christine is a 4th year PhD student from NRES working in the Hoover Lab at the Illinois Natural History Survey. She studies wild turkey behavior – specifically, how forest management may influence turkey habitat selection at different scales, and how incubation behavior may influence reproductive success.
A Week in the Life – Tara Stewart Merrill
Tara is 5th year PhD Candidate from PEEC working in the Cáceres lab. Her work integrates theory from disease ecology and ecological immunology to better understand the causes and consequences of variable immunity for the dynamics of infectious disease. Tara’s research explores the invertebrate immune response, how it is shaped by environmental factors, and how individual variation in immunity scales up to affect host-parasite dynamics at the population level.
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A Week in the Life – Stephany Virrueta Herrera
Stephany is a second year PhD student from PEEC working in Kevin Johnson’s lab. Her work focuses on the evolutionary patterns of avian ectoparasites (lice), using whole genomes of lice, and phylogenomics. She also works on seal lice.
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A Week in the Life – Shelby Lawson
Shelby is a second year PhD student from Animal Biology, working in Mark Hauber’s lab. Her research focuses on the perceptual and neural processing of functional reference calling in yellow warblers, and the effects of experience on these mechanisms.
A Week in the Life – Lynette Strickland
Lynette is a 5th year PhD student in Animal Biology working in the Cáceres lab. Her research takes advantage of a naturally-occurring color polymorphism in a species of Neotropical tortoise beetle (Chelymorpha alternans). She investigates both the ecological (predation and sexual selection) and genomic (through genome sequencing and linkage mapping) forces that maintain this phenotypic variation in this system.