University of Michigan
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Incoming graduate student Katherine Crocker recently spent 20 months as a sustainable agriculture Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal, Africa.  Her main role was to distribute improved seeds to local farmers in efforts to increase their food security and crop yields while improving the nutritive value of their food.  She also worked with farmers on more effective and environmentally friendly farming techniques. 

Her secondary projects focused on education. “I taught mothers how to make a more nutritious and digestible porridge for their babies, and helped paint three world maps on schools in the area,” she said. She worked as a translator for Right to Sight, an American organization of eye surgeons who travel to developing countries to perform affordable eye surgeries for locals while teaching the techniques to surgeons in the area.

During her freshman year at Cornell University, she attended a Peace Corps information session and knew from then that this was something she wanted to do. “It just became part of the plan.”

Being in the Peace Corps was an incredible growing experience, she said.  “I learned a lot about myself and the U.S. culture, as well as learning a lot of near-universal things about people and the new culture in which I lived. It is the hardest thing I've ever done, but one of the most rewarding.  It's an eye-opener about policy, too.  Once you see the problems that we only read about here, and once you participate in the initiatives that seem like such wonderful ideas in the newspaper, you realize that development and aid work is much more complicated than it's made out to be, and that we can't just pursue ideas that make us feel better if we really want to see any sort of sustainable improvement."

Crocker’s favorite part of the whole experience “was probably getting to know and love the family she lived with, and seeing how generously they accepted me into the family.”

She is happy to discuss development work, email crockerk@umich.edu.

Image: Crocker fords a small river with her Peace Corps-issue mountain bike, which was her primary transportation during her service.

EEB graduate student Huateng Huang will receive the Donald W. Tinkle Scholarship from U-M Museum of Zoology. This $5,000 award is a special recognition of her research excellence. Huang’s research investigates the underlying genetic mechanism of speciation.  

“Investigating the genetic divergence of neutral loci among species gives many insights about how species diverged from each other and the evolutionary driving forces behind it,” she said. “However, gene trees constructed from different loci often have different patterns, especially in recently diverged species. Variations between loci on a genome and between individuals in a population need to be considered to obtain a reliable estimation of species history. How to bridge the traditional population genetic approach with the approaches of molecular phylogeny is a field that requires further investigation. My research mainly involves testing how two stochastic processes -- mutation and lineage sorting -- affect our ability to recoverthe history of closely related species with both simulated and empirical data."

The scholarship was endowed by the family and friends of Tinkle, former curator of herpetology and director of the Museum of Zoology.

EEB Ph.D. student Tory Hendry has won the Edwin H. Edwards Scholarship in Biology. She is comparing the genomes of two symbiotic luminous bacteria that live in light organs of their fish hosts, causing them to glow.

“My previous work with the genome of one symbiont has shown that unlike other luminous symbionts, flashlight fish symbionts are obligately dependent on their hosts for growth,” Hendry said. “I am sequencing the genome of another species of symbiont to see how similar the two are. I'll be comparing gene content, nucleotide substitution rate and the affect of genetic drift between the two genomes to determine what evolutionary processes act in these interesting symbionts. I will be testing for similarities between these luminous symbionts and other groups of obligate symbionts.”

The scholarship is for graduate students studying biology. The recipient is selected based on the novelty and scholarship of the proposed research; the clarity, merit, and appropriate scope and feasibility of the research plan; progress in the program including prior research results; and a letter of recommendation.

The award is for the 2011 – 2012 academic year, including one semester of stipend, tuition at the candidate level, and GradCare benefits.

John S. Sparks, U-M EEB Ph.D. alumnus (2001) is blogging from Madagascar for the New York Times in their Scientist at Work, Notes from the Field blog. Sparks, curator of ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History, is studying cave fish along with his colleague, Christopher Braun. Sparks was a student of Professor Bill Fink's at the Museum of Zoology.

You can read about U-M EEB graduate students' summer research experiences from around the world on the new EEBlog. These students are blogging from the following locations: Cindy Bick, the London Zoological Society; Rachel Cable, Gondar, Ethiopia; John Guittar, Yasuni Scientific Research Station, Ecuador; Lucy Tran, Kibale National Park, Uganda. Qixin He will blog from Africa this fall. Feel free to leave comments and/or follow the blog. We’d love to hear from you. If you are an U-M EEB student, we would also like to have more bloggers, even if you’re staying in Ann Arbor for the summer.

The EEBlog was in the U-M Record Update June 22, 2011, and is currently on the U-M Gateway.

EEB Ph.D. students John Marino and Mike Sheehan are the 2011 recipients of the Edwin S. George Reserve Scholarship to enhance their research at the George Reserve. 

Marino is examining the distributions of parasites among amphibian populations across a landscape of ponds. He is interested in the interactive effects of parasites and predators on amphibians.

Sheehan is studying cognitive development in wasps. They each received $2,700.

2010 recipients of the ESGR Scholarships were Marino, Sheehan, and Leiling Tao. Tao studies how resource imbalance affects species interactions under global environmental change.

Incoming EEB Ph.D. students Katherine Crocker, Serge Farinas and Senay Yitbarek have been awarded the Rackham Merit Fellowship, one of the largest and most prestigious awards for incoming students. The fellowship funds five years of their doctoral work.

The students will take part in a two-month 2011 Merit Fellow Summer Institute to help them prepare for their doctoral studies.

During the summer, Crocker will work in the lab of Professor Liz Tibbetts on chemical communication in Hymenoptera (wasps). In general, Crocker’s doctoral research will involve behavioral ecology research.

Farinas will continue his master’s thesis work this summer looking at how changing temperature and precipitation along a climate grid influence alpine plant community chemistry (nutrient concentrations and ratios) with Professors Deborah Goldberg and Knute Nadelhoffer. Farinas’ doctoral work will expand on his master’s research. “Understanding changes to plant chemistry is vital as these differences can lead to further changes in ecosystem function via plant-soil feedbacks and changes to associated microbial and animal communities,” said Farinas.

Using computer simulations, Yitbarek will investigate how competitive species interactions can give rise to the formation of spatial patterns in ecological systems with Professor John Vandermeer this summer. Yitbarek said, “this exciting research will provide a new framework from which to tackle the age old question of species coexistence by using tools from game-theory, dynamical systems, and graph theory. Understanding how species coexist within a spatial framework will contribute to the age old question of how biodiversity is maintained,” said Yitbarek.

The Rackham Merit Fellowship Program helps sustain the academic excellence and inclusiveness of the Michigan graduate community, one that embraces students with diverse experiences and goals, and who come from many educational, cultural, geographic, and familial backgrounds. The RMFP is competitive and recognizes entering students who have outstanding academic qualifications, show exceptional potential for scholarly success in their graduate program, and demonstrate promise for contributing to wider academic, professional, or civic communities. The doctoral fellowship provides up to a five-year funding package in partnership with the graduate program that includes tuition, required fees, stipend, health and dental coverage, during each fall and winter term, with select summer stipend and benefits.

EEB Ph.D. students Lucy Tran, Qixin He and Na Wei have each received a Rackham International Research Award (RIRA). Tran and Qixin also received an Edwin C. Hinsdale Scholarship.

Tran studies the spatiotemporal impacts of habitat change on the forest-dependent black-and-white monkeys (Colobus guereza) in southwestern Uganda. She will assess impacts using coupled phylogeographic, demographic, and spatially-explicit analyses. Project findings will contribute to understanding of how historical and contemporary processes have affected this once widespread primate and allow for an informed evaluation of the species' long-term viability that takes into account regional patterns of genetic variability and connectivity. Tran received $3,500.

Qixin will use the research funds to help fund her field study to Cameroon in the fall where she will continue her research that explores the rapid adaptive evolution of a mosquito, also known as the malaria vector, Anopheles gambiae. Qixin received $3,000.

Wei travels to Barro Colorado Island, Panama, for five weeks of summer field work. She will investigate whether proximity is a proxy of maternity in animal-dispersed tropical tree species. The widely accepted norm in plant ecology has been challenged by the long-distance dispersal introduced by the diverse generalist avian and terrestrial dispersers in tropical trees. Wei received $2,000.

The Rackham Graduate School presents the RIRAs to students with strong academic records who demonstrate outstanding scholarly and professional promise, steady progress toward their degrees and have feasible plans for conducting international research.

The Hinsdale Awards of $5,000 are granted by the U-M Museum of Zoology to students admitted to candidacy who show research potential, demonstrate high achievement and whose dissertation chair or co-chair is a UMMZ curator.

EEB graduate student Jeremy Wright won the 2011 EEB Outstanding Student Paper Award for "Conservative Coevolution of Müllerian Mimicry in a Group of Rift Lake Catfish," the cover story in the February issue of Evolution.

“We chose this paper because the author used a variety of approaches to answer an interesting and understudied question about how Müllerian mimicry evolves,” wrote Joseph Coolon, one of the postdoctoral fellows who reviewed the submitted papers. “The author used creative, well-performed assays using evolutionarily interesting non-model organisms and the results show a novel mechanism for the origin of Müllerian mimicry and also characterized one of few known examples of Müllerian mimicry in vertebrates.  Finally, the paper was well-written, accessible to people in other fields, and claims are supported throughout. While all the papers submitted were great, we feel that this paper stood out as the best overall.”

Every year one graduate student paper is selected based on approach of study, scope of findings, and insights into questions of broad scientific interest using multiple lines of evidence. The prize is $500.

Check out these awards received by EEB graduate students Ya Yang, Na Wei, Leiling Tao, and Alexa Unruh during the 2010-2011 academic year.

Yang was awarded $10,000 for one year from the National Tropical Botanical Garden for her project, “Phylogenetic analysis of Hawaiian Chamaesyce using nuclear low-copy markers.” Yang is investigating unresolved issues related to Euphorbia, an important genus of Hawaiian flora. Her research will contribute to an understanding of its biogeography and adaptive evolution. 

Wei received a Rackham International Student Fellowship of $7,500 for tuition or stipend during spring/summer 2011. Her research focuses on dissecting gene flow pathways in tropical forest tree species. She is interested in integrating ecological modeling and genetic approaches into the study of interactions between tree species and their dispersal vectors.  The award is based on a strong academic record, progress toward degree, demonstration of outstanding academic and professional promise.

Tao received a Matthaei Botanical Gardens Fellowship of $760.00. Tao is researching the interaction of plant stoichiometric imbalance and toxicity of secondary chemicals on herbivore growth. She is exploring whether the negative effects of plant toxins on animals are dependent on plant quality.

Unruh was awarded a Huron Mountain Wildlife Foundation research grant of over $10,000 to support her master’s thesis fieldwork in 2010-2011. Her study is titled, “Shrews and global change: An investigation of the microclimates experienced by shrews in the northern Great Lakes."  Unruh studies shrew communities and the microhabitat variables influencing them, with a particular focus on temperature and humidity in 10 different habitats.