Part of my post doc is geared toward creating a program that broadens STEM participation in traditionally underrepresented students. I was lucky to have been invited to join an initiative led by Dr. Aaron Thomas from the U of M to participate as a STEM educator and create a short project for Native American middle school students to experience a STEM subject. I created a river biomonitoring project, where kids had to use aquatic insects to assess and compare the health of 2 streams in Missoula. Our program was a huge success and we even got featured in the Missoulian, our local news paper! 

Our field work has finally begun this Spring at the beautiful MPG North property! We are actively searching aspen trees at our field sites for leaf-miner presence. Though rain and generally colder spring temperatures have delayed the budding of aspen leaves, we hope we'll have a pretty great season! We'll be measuring thermal performance in leaf miners and wasp parasites (if we can find them!)

My new year began with a new job. I am now in Missoula, Montana as a post doc in the Woods Lab. Here I will continue to explore the effects of temperature on aquatic insect ecology and acquaint myself with a new system - the aspen leaf miner - to investigate micro- scale temperature variation and miner ecology. I am also honored and excited to teach concepts in biology to middle school students on the Flathead Indian Reservation.

My colleagues Nick Polato (Cornell) and Brian Gill (Brown University) along with fantastic co-authors  have published a new study to explain why tropical mountains are more biodiverse than temperate ones. Our team of scientists studied the physiology, genetics, and genomics of aquatic insects in Andean and Rocky Mountain aquatic insects to test Janzen's 1967 hypothesis. We found that narrow thermal tolerance leads to reduced gene flow and therefore greater rates of speciation across elevation gradients in the tropics but not in temperate mountains. This study also highlights the importance of integrative and collaborative work to tackle the big questions of our time. University press articles about our study can be found here (CSU) and here (Cornell) 

Graduation Day! I'm thankful to have finally made it here. This was definitely a day for reflection and for gratitude to all the amazing people I have met along the way, who have shaped this fantastic PhD experience. I am especially thankful to my two advisors, Cameron Ghalambor and Chris Funk for guiding me through and for believing in me until the end! In a few months, I'm off to Montana to begin my post doc chapter.

I am absolutely thrilled to announce that I received an NSF post doctoral fellowship! I will be joining the wonderful lab of Dr. Art Woods at the University of Montana in Missoula early in 2019. Art is a fantastic eco-physiologist and together we will be working on discovering how micro-sclae temperature affects an important little sedentary ecotherm - the leafminer. These moth larvae can wreak havoc on aspen trees in the Rocky Mountains, so understanding their thermal physiology will be beneficial to the management of their populations. 

I am incredibly excited to join a team of wonderful scientists studying the thermal tolerance of vulnerable, endemic stoneflies only found in glacial meltwater high up in the Grand Teton of Wyoming. The lead PI is Scott Hotaling, who is trying to establish these delicate glacial ecosystems as long-term ecological monitoring sites so that they can be monitored and protected.

I'm excited to have been selected as one of 7 contestants for the Ray Huey Award for best student talk. My talk is the first in the line up, so I will be kicking off the session (yikes)! Come check out my talk on Jan 4th at 8:00AM. I will be sharing the results of part of my DDIG experiments that were conducted over the past several months. Here is my talk abstract.

We have a new paper out in ICB dealing with acclimation of temperate and tropical aquatic insects. We found, as predicted, tropical mayflies were worse at acclimating than their temperate counterparts. But we found no difference between temperate and tropical stoneflies! Our paper was also featured on the ICB blog - check it out!

Thank you to Functional Ecology for choosing our picture for this month's issue! It's a great honor!