People

2020 (top left-right) Dr. Tobin Hammer, Megan O’Connell, Dr. Sean Griffin, Sam Wilhelm, Dr. Caroline Strang, Dr. Harry Siviter; (bottom left-right) Dr. Shalene Jha, Dr. Felicity Muth, Laurel Treviño, Dr. Hollis Woodard, Camila Cortina, Elizabeth Lopez, Nick Ivers. Laurel Treviño formatted photos & summarized bios.

2017 (left-right) Dr. Shalene Jha, Dr. Elinor Lichtenberg, Laurel Treviño, Nick Ivers, Kim Ballare, Sarah Cusser, Nate Pope, Megan O’Connell (also photographer)

2014  Kim Ballare, Nate Pope, Alan Ritchie, Rebecca Ruppel, Sarah Cunningham, Dr. Hollis Woodard, Laurel Treviño, Dr. Antonio Castilla, Dr. Shalene Jha, Sarah Cusser, Esther Schenau, Megan O’Connell

 

Principle Investigator Professor – Shalene’s CV

Dr. Shalene Jha is a conservation biologist specialized in the fields of landscape genetics, population ecology, and foraging ecology. Her work examines how landscape composition influences gene flow processes, foraging patterns, and population viability for plants and animals. She has experience in population genetics, movement modeling, GIS, and ecosystem service science, and she conducts her research internationally, across temperate and tropical ecosystems.

Graduate Students

 Livia Raulinaitis studies plant-insect interactions in the context of ecological restoration and climate change. She is interested in plant ecotype variation and its impact on pollinator network assembly. She is a Certified Ecological Restoration Practitioner in training (CERP-IT).

 

Liliana Benitez studies plant-insect interactions and conservation biology. She has worked on rare plant conservation with research and land management organizations in Florida, Idaho, and New Mexico. Currently, she’s researching how plant and pollinator traits impact pollination networks and ecosystem functions. Lili is also passionate about science outreach and increasing accessibility to outdoor green spaces.

Post-doctoral Researchers

Dr. Deidre Zoll  is a Community & Regional Planner (UT Austin) who investigates the connections between city-led climate adaptation planning and environmental racism in the US. She uses plan evaluation, spatial statistics, surveys, and case studies to identify how structural racism influences the exposure to climate risks and the proximity to adaptation interventions, and how planners and community activists navigate these dynamics. See Deirdre’s website

Dr. Harry Siviter investigates the impact of anthropogenic stressors on bee health. He’s fascinated by animal behavior and cognition and passionate about conservation ecology. He earned his PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, studying how agrochemicals affect bees. website

 

Dr. Nicholas Ivers bridges the fields of conservation genetics and disease ecology. He is studying squash bee populations among the crops he planted across the Agriculture Sciences experimental fields at Pennsylvania State University. He commutes between University Park and Austin to collaborate with Dr. Margarita López-Uribe (Entomology Department, Penn State) and Dr. Shalene Jha (Integrative Biology, UT Austin). He earned his Ph.D. at UT Austin  nui15@psu.edu

Lead Technician-Project Manager

Michael Caballero manages the Southern Plains Restoration Pollinator Project, which examines the effects of prescribed burns and native plant seeding on plant and pollinator communities in the Cross Timbers ecoregion. He’s an entomologist focused on insect and restoration ecology, insect-plant interactions, insect taxonomy, and systematics. He volunteers at the UT Insect Collection, does independent research, and curates his growing insect collection.

External Collaborator/Bee Guru

Jack Neff is a key collaborator and lifeline to understanding the bees of the southern U.S., provides us with invaluable insights on the natural history, ecological interactions, and evolutionary processes of native bees in Texas. Dr. John L. Neff founded and heads the Central Texas Melittological Institute in Austin.

Former Graduate Students

Dr. Nick Ivers shared his doctoral research findings in a superb presentation that helped us understand how land use affects population genetic structure and local variation in parasite abundance among native bees, specifically bumble bees across California and Texas landscapes.

Camila Cortina, M.Sc., is interested in how land-use affects pollinator population dynamics through the lenses of population and landscape genetics. She uses the knowledge gained through research to help inform people in all walks of life how to make the environment a better place for all.

Dr. Megan O’Connell studies the effects of climate and land-use change on plant-pollinator dynamics and genetic diversity of plant populations in tropical forests. She does science communication and outreach and works on media projects focusing on scientific awareness at home and abroad. website

 

Dr. Sarah Cusser researches agricultural, industrial, urban habitat disturbance, affects plant-pollinator communities, and how restoration of disturbed habitats influence those interactions. After a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Kellogg Biological Station, Michigan State, she joined the Santa Barbara Botanical Gardens in California. website

Dr. Kim Ballare has interests in ecology and evolution, including conservation genetics, landscape ecology, and urban ecology. Her research focuses on plant-pollinator interactions, how urban landscapes shape native bee communities and how they affect genetic population structure and local adaptation. She’s a Post-doctoral Scholar at The University of California at Santa Cruz. website

Dr. Nathaniel Pope researched the influence of parasites on the dispersal ability, foraging behavior, and reproductive success of bees. He’s interested in how the tools of population genetics and landscape ecology can be used to infer patterns of movement and behavior in agro-ecological systems. He’s fond of statistical modeling, bee phylogeny, and taxonomy. npope@coa.edu

Dr. Emlyn Jane Resetarits is interested in how species interactions affect communities and ecosystems. She works on understanding how interspecific interactions (among protists & parasites, daphnia & snails) alter sociality and how scale influences species interactions and ecosystem functions

 

Former Post-docs 

Dr. Gabriella Pardee works on a federally-funded Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative that leverages pollen DNA meta-barcoding to quantify plant-pollinator interactions, pollinator foraging breadth, and pollen-pollinator origin in global land use change. Gabby is now the Research Director at the Wild Basin Creative Research Center with St. Edward’s University. website

Dr. Hannah Gray researches how insect-plant interactions & biogeography influence ecosystem services & disservices in agriculture. She examines relationships between insect herbivores and pollinators in a shared host using molecular techniques to build field-verified food webs. Hannah now serves as the State Invertebrate Biologist for the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department.

Dr. Sean Griffin is interested in ecological restoration, fire ecology, insect movement, and pollinator conservation across fragmented landscapes. In the Jha lab, he examined how prescribed burns and other practices affect plant-pollinator communities in prairie ecosystems. He currently is the Director of Science & Conservation at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. website

Dr. Elinor Lichtenberg Is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Texas, where she employs field, lab and quantitative approaches to her research. She is interested in pollinator conservation and how animal interactions alter plant-animal interactions. Her research in the Jha lab focused on pollinator community ecology under experimental prairie habitat restoration. website 

Dr. Antonio Castilla is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Plant Biology, Ecology and Evolution at Oklahoma State University. His work focuses on ecology and evolution of plant-animal interactions, landscape genetics, plant mating systems & spatial ecology. As a postdoc, he studied bee pollinators of Miconia spp. tropical trees in Panama, and native plant pollinators in Central Texas. website 

Dr. Hollis Woodard is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Entomology at the University of California – Riverside. As a NIFA postdoc, she studied nutritional ecology and conservation of native bees, focusing on the effects of nutrient limitation on behavior & development in bumble bee life cycles. She is an assistant professor in the Entomology Department at The University of California at Riverside. website 

Former Visiting Scholar 

Dr. Rodolfo Jaffe Ribbi investigates the relationship between land use and bee population dynamics; population genomics of bees; the interphase between pre-copulatory and post-copulatory sexual selection in social insects; and beekeeping as a sustainable development tool. He’s a research scientist at the University of Sao Paolo and Vale Institute of Technology. website

Former Research Technicians

Alejandro Santillana studies the impact of climate change and land conversion on plant-pollinator networks. He surveys, identifies and curates pollinator insects at University of Oregon Ponisio Lab and does outreach for UT’s Insects Unlocked. website

 

Elizabeth Lopez graduated from UT with a biology major. As a research technician, she worked identifying and curating specimens that she collected for the prairie restoration project, and studied pollinator networks for an independent project.

 

Benjamin Durrington is experienced in restoration, microscopy and meta-barcoding. He’s interested in plant ecology and evolution, especially plant mutualisms. He worked with pollen samples to understand plant communities around Austin and vegetation monitoring.

 

Former Outreach Coordinator

Laurel Treviño Murphy is a biologist, botanist, and wildland resource scientist whose public engagement work focuses on native plant and bee conservation. In addition to developing much of the Jha Lab outreach materials, she co-developed the Native Bees of Texas course, and helped establish the UT Bee Campus and collaborates with Austin Bee City (Xerces).

Former Lab Managers

Rebecca Ruppel got her M.S. at Syracuse University studying patterns of inheritance in polyploid plants and worked with Judie Bronstein at the University of Arizona.           

 

Clare Glinka got our field & lab projects going! Her M.S. in Plant Biology from the University of Texas, Austin, focused on plant-microbe interactions. Both Becky and Clare currently work in computational sciences in Austin, Texas.

 

Former Undergraduate Students’ Research and Work

  1. Sam Wilhelm: worked in geography, pollinator prairie restoration project
  2. Sydney Rivera: was conservation UT Rio Grande Valley-ESI Summer Researcher
  3. Sarah Cunningham: did plant & butterfly collection & identification
  4. Karima Khimani: studied environmental effects on gene flow
  5. Esther Schenau: worked on bee genetics
  6. Emily Wagner: worked on genetics of communication
  7. Mustafa Saifuddin: did a thesis on bee foraging
  8. Ashley Doucet: was the field crew’s expert bee catcher
  9. Shannon Dang: curated insects for the prairie restoration project
  10. Alan Ritchie: began the pollen ID project, studied agriculture pollinator communities
  11. Apoorva Magadi: augmented the pollen image library in the pollen ID project
  12. Fabiola Rodriguez: advanced the Miconia spp. tropical pollination project
  13. Kelvey Merill and Brittany French were part of the first field crew

Fun Times with the Team