Author: juliadperrone

Many congratulations to our PhD candidate Christian Bullion for successfully defending her PhD prospectus Factors Contributing to the Reliability of Data in Odonata in Citizen Science! Christian has been doing some truly interesting work comparing citizen science records of Odonates (dragonflies and damselflies) against museum records for known populations and is uncovering some very compelling trends indeed. Way to go Christian!!

New paper in PLoS Computational Biology!

The Dynamic Shift Detector: An algorithm to identify changes in parameter values governing populations
Christie Bahlai (Kent State University Dept. of Biological Sciences)
Elise Zipkin (Michigan State University Dept. of Integrative Biology)

Two of our intrepid PhD students, Katie Manning and Christian Bullion, have both won The Graduate Student Senate Research Award! The awarded funding will help them each to further their research projects in 2020. As awardees, both Katie and Christian will present research posters at the 35th Annual Graduate Research Symposium in March 2021. Way to go team!

Our undergraduate research assistant Erin White has been elected President of the Biology Club! Erin is very passionate about her student career in Biological Sciences and has many big plans in store for her tenure as President. Good luck Erin and congratulations on your win!!

Our PhD student Cheyan Pace has won the award for Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Assistant in Biological Sciences!! Cheyan spent the last two semesters teaching Biological Diversity and Biological Foundations Labs and doing a fantastic job! She really enjoys teaching her students and works very hard to make sure they’re getting the most out of the labs she teaches, so it’s wonderful to see her receive this much deserved recognition of her efforts. Congratulations Cheyan!

Christian Bullion took home the award for her poster Using Crowdsourced Data to Analyze Patterns in Odonate Phenology at this year’s Graduate Student Symposium in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology category! Part of Christian’s PhD work will focus on understanding citizen science participation in Odonate monitoring and reporting, as well as field work involving ground-truthing reported Odonate findings from Ohio south to Virginia.

In mid July, the Bahlai lab traveled to the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada for the Canadian Society of Ecology and Evolution Conference. We had a very successful trip leaning about lots of incredible ecological and evolutionary research being conducted and also presented three posters of our own work!