Join the lab!

Undergraduate students: I will typically have opportunities for GT undergraduate students to get involved in research. Contact me for more information.

Graduate students: I do not anticipate taking students to start Fall 2025 (applying in late 2024). Get in touch with me if you are interested in joining my lab. I can accept graduate students to Georgia Tech through the College of Biological Sciences and QBioS. Graduate school is an amazing opportunity—five years to follow your passion and gain new skills as you become a professional biologist. It is also a difficult challenge—plenty of work, mostly self-driven, and the professional outcomes, while good in the long-term, are uncertain (though grad school was originally designed to train future faculty, obtaining a tenure track job is in fact the “alternative” career path). How graduate school in ecology and evolution works can also seem mysterious: this explainer article provides an excellent overview.

I take my responsibility as a mentor seriously. I am looking for prospective graduate students who are (1) passionate about the theme of mountain biodiversity in the Anthropocene, and (2) have a high degree of independence and can take charge on their own fieldwork.

Finances: Graduate stipends at GT are $33,500 for 2023-2024 and will increase over the next five years. Graduate students in my lab are supported by Graduate Research Assistants (I pay your stipend from research grants), Graduate Teaching Assistants (you work as a TA for your stipend) and external fellowships. You should plan on applying to external fellowships: for example, US students are eligible for the NSF pre-doctoral fellowship which provides 3 years of support. I can help you develop fellowship proposals.

Postdoctoral fellows: Contact me if you have ideas for working with me as a postdoc. There are two paths to postdoc opportunities. First, I will sometimes have funding to directly support a postdoc in my lab. Second, I can help you develop proposals for external fellowships (for example: NSF postdoctoral fellowship, Ford Foundation, Smith Fellows, Fulbright)

Fall 2024: I will soon be looking for a postdoc. Two research themes I am especially interested in are: (1) testing mechanisms of the escalator to extinction (fieldwork to measure demography, tracking tech to measure movement ecology along elevational gradients), and (2) monitoring mountain birds at scale using ARUs. I welcome discussing your own research ideas: if you had a salary and some research funds, what research on mountain birds & climate change would you do???