Join us
I welcome applications from students and postdocs interested in developing projects at the interface of empirical and theoretical ecology. While the empirical side of my own research is primarily focused on aquatic systems (intertidal, subtidal and streams), I’m happy to advise students working on whatever system is best-suited for answering their research questions.
Graduate students
If you’re interested in joining the lab, please send me an email to tell me about your general research interests, what you’d like to get out of grad-school, and why you’d like to join my lab in particular. (Chances are that your specific interests will change several times during your first years of grad-school, so don’t worry if you don’t have a project all figured-out. Please just help me get a good sense of the type of topics you’d like to work on, what motivates you to work on them, and what you’d like to come away with at the end in terms of your “tool kit”.) Please also attach a CV/resume and contact information for three references. The application deadline for our department is December 1st. Our department guarantees 5 years of support to all its PhD students in the form of TAships. Nevertheless, I strongly encourage you to have applied for the various pre-doctoral fellowships, most of which have earlier deadlines. More information on the department’s grad program and application process can be found on our Integrative Biology department’s website.
Undergraduate students
Undergraduates become involved in our research through a variety of ways, ranging from volunteer opportunities, paid assistantships, as well as independent research experiences. We are actively fostering diversity within the lab, so I encourage all interested students to contact me (or the lab’s graduate students and postdocs). Volunteer and paid assistantship opportunities often involve working with myself or a graduate student supporting the research projects of the lab. Volunteers have often ended up becoming paid research assistants or have pursued their own independent research projects (particularly when they’ve joined the lab early in their undergraduate careers). Independent research experiences typically involve student-led projects for transcript credit (incl. transcript-visible “distinction in research”), fulfilling Honors requirements, or academic- and/or summer quarter research supported by scholarships or fellowships (e.g., URISC, SURE, etc.). Note that you don’t need to have a project in mind before joining the lab, but please do articulate why you’re interested in our lab when you contact us.
