Our Team

Our first co-leader of the program is Ali Campbell. Ali is a 4th-year PhD student in Dr. Tom Miller’s lab. She combines experiments and mathematical modeling to understand how mutualisms between ants and cacti help drive coexistence between species.

Our second co-leader is Eric Wuesthoff. He is a 3rd-year PhD student in Dr. Amy Dunham’s lab who does research in Madagascar. Eric studied how primates in tropical rainforests move seeds from plants and help forests regrow in areas influenced by human activity.

Maggie Baker is a PhD student in Dr. Sven Kranz’s lab. She studies how polar algae acclimate to seasonal changes and compete for survival in Antarctic sea ice environments.

Howan Chan is a 1st year PhD student in Dr. Kory Evans’s lab who studies the evolution of skull shapes in fish. Howan’s research focuses on understanding the diversity of fish skulls and the factors that either promote or limit the evolution of their shapes over different periods of time.

Annie Finneran is a 2nd year PhD student in Dr. Lydia Beaudrot’s lab. She studies interdisciplinary science and its role in macroecology and conservation (and all fields of science!). She enjoys looking at “the big picture” of anthropogenic change from different perspectives to try and understand the drivers, consequences, and potential solutions to biodiversity threats.

Chia Hsieh is a 5th yearPhD student in the Tropical Ecology and Conservation Lab at Rice. Her interest is to understand how mammals and birds distribute and coexist across tropical rainforests.

Alex Jimenez-Martin is a 1st-year student in Dr. Tom Miller and Dr. Matthew McCary’s labs. She is interested in understanding climate change impacts on plants and arthropod communities.