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Stony Brook Matters: News for Stony Brook University's alumni and friends.
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| Ecology and Evolution Fall 2024 Newsletter |
 Dear Alumni and Friends,
I'm excited to introduce myself as the new chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolution. I’m honored to follow Resit Akçakaya's outstanding leadership and look forward to fostering our Department's tradition of excellence.
We are expanding our faculty with searches for new positions focused on 'Genomics in a Changing World' and 'Drylands Ecology. and I am thrilled to welcome our newest faculty member, Jackie Weissman (see our spotlight below). We are proud to share several highlights of accomplishments of our outstanding faculty who are leaders in their disciplines and beyond.
We are proud of our commitment to diversity and inclusion, fostering an exceptional environment where LGBTQ+ individuals and members of underrepresented groups thrive. We are currently conducting a self-study and developing our strategic plan, in preparation for an external review in the spring. This helps us shape a bold vision that leverages our momentum to expand our Department's size, elevate our rankings, and establish us as a global leader in the field.
We aim to achieve our vision by supporting our students and faculty, such as by providing support for undergraduate researchers so that students from all backgrounds can participate in this transformative experience. Your financial support is crucial. Please consider a donation to our Department Excellence Fund or one of our other funds.
Thank you for staying connected and for your ongoing support of the Department of Ecology and Evolution. This newsletter contains a treasure trove of exciting news and achievements that we are proud to share during this time of tremendous momentum for our Department. Together, we will continue to achieve great things!
Sincerely,
Joshua S. Rest
Associate Professor and Chair |
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| Celebrating the Legacy of Robert Sokal |
| A memorial for Robert "Bob" Sokal is now on the National Academy of Sciences website. Bob was a founding member of the Department of Ecology and Evolution, contributing substantially to its development and reputation. He was a pioneering biostatistician and evolutionary biologist who played a significant role in shaping the field. |
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| Faculty Spotlight |
| Jackie Lee “JL” Weissman (they/she) is a new assistant professor in E&E. Her research examines how microbes survive and thrive across diverse environments. Jackie develops new tools to infer what microbes are doing and can do from DNA sequences captured directly from the environment (“metagenomes”), aiming to improve the representation of microbially-mediated biogeochemical cycles in global climate models. She also has a special interest in using a combination of comparative genomics, population genetics, and mathematical models to understand the ancient and ongoing battle between microbes and their viruses. |
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| Faculty Spotlights |
| Heather Lynch has been awarded the prestigious Golden Goose Award, which recognizes groundbreaking research that may seem odd or quirky at first but has led to significant discoveries. Heather's work, focused on penguin colonies and climate change, exemplifies the spirit of the Golden Goose Award. Her innovative research has shed light on the profound impact of climate change on these iconic creatures and has contributed to our understanding of the broader ecological implications of global warming. We congratulate Heather on this well-deserved honor and celebrate her exceptional contributions to science and research. |
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Ross Nehm was one of 15 international scholars selected to serve on the National Science Foundation funded committee “Advancing AI in Science Education: A Comprehensive Approach to Equity, Inclusion, and Three-Dimensional Learning.” The committee is charged with establishing norms, frameworks, and guidelines for AI-involved science education research. |
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Dianna Padilla is the newly-elected president of the American Microscopical Society, which publishes the journal Invertebrate Biology. |
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The Institute for Globalization Studies recently featured Liliana Dávalos's participation at CoP16 and the Convention on Biological Diversity in their news. |
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Graduate Spotlights
 Rupert Ikeh
Rupert Ikeh received the Dean Prize for the best graduate student poster at the New England Estuarine Research Society Meeting in Freeport, Maine. His presentation was "Spatial patterns in salt marsh plant stress derived from photosynthesis measures and satellite imagery analysis."
 Sarah Vaccaro
Sarah Vaccaro was in the field in September collecting tissue samples from tenrecs in and around Ranomafana National Park, Madagascar. These samples will enable her to carry out genomic, epigenetic, and isotopic analyses to investigate the mechanisms used by organisms to cope with anthropogenic disturbance. |
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| Undergraduate Spotlight |
Reformed and Ready! The Ecoevo Undergraduate Society is back and stronger than ever! They’re a group of passionate students dedicated to exploring ecology and evolution.The group is seeking opportunities to get involved in research on campus and connect with like-minded individuals.
Photo, left to right: Timothy Gonzalez, treasurer; Grace Frankstone, president; and Varun Gambhir, secretary. Not pictured: Alexis Gutierrez, vice president. |
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Summer 2024
Explorations in STEM |
Samara Hayes, a sophomore biology major and Simons STEM Scholar, completed the Summer 2024 Explorations in STEM program in Professor Bob Thacker's lab and presented a poster at the Summer Research Symposium.
Pictured: Bob Thacker, Rebecca Balaban, Samara Hayes, and Raisa Campos Rizzieri. Samara Hayes is a Simons Scholar who is working in the Thacker Lab. |
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| From the Bat Cave: Integrative Disease Ecology Research for Undergraduates |
| Professor Liliana Davalos is seeking students for an exciting seven-week paid National Science Foundation (NSF) research experience investigating environment-host-virome dynamics within wild Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus). The experience will include fieldwork in Puerto Rico, hands-on training, data analysis, coding, and science communication. |
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| Research Notebook |
Faculty members Dianna Padilla and Ross Nehm along with alum Becky Grella led a large group of Brentwood School District teachers and administrators in a day of research at Flax Pond marine laboratory. They focused on learning about the ecology of salt marshes and engaging in research aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards.
The project is part of a >$1M New York State Education Department grant to help teachers understand, develop, and implement three-dimensional learning experiences in their classrooms. |
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Assistant Professor Natasha Vitek is principal investigator on a grant from NSF, "Harnessing a high-resolution fossil record and novel (AI) workflows to study the effects of climate change on mammalian functional diversity." The project combines new fieldwork, new scanning, and development of AI-assisted fossil processing to develop a data-rich picture of how functional diversity of mammalian communities reorganized in response to the climate change of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. |
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Sushma Reddy, professor at the University of Minnesota and curator of birds at the Bell Museum, is visiting the Dávalos lab for her NSF-funded sabbatical. During her visit, she will collaborate on the island biogeography dynamics of birds in Madagascar and deploy phylogenomics across several bird radiations. |
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Liliana Dávalos
Liliana Dávalos presented results of her Fulbright research on deforestation in the Amazon on the banks of the river in Leticia, Colombia. She has been working with scientists from Brazil, Ecuador, and Bolivia on tackling climate-related disasters.
The six-person climate change team recently shared their insights and experience in a symposium open to the SBU community. |
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In July, Tara Smiley along with PhD student Sam Lavin and postdoc Paul Barrett joined a new team of paleontologists and geologists working with the Turkana Basin Institute. The team is studying Locherangan, a 17-million-year-old fossil site in the Turkana Basin in Kenya. The field season was remarkably productive, with the team discovering more than 300 fossils including primates, carnivores, rodents, reptiles, and more. |
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In August, Tara Smiley and her PhD students Sam Lavin, Imogene Welles, and Megan Wyatt attended an NSF Research Coordination Network field trip around Colorado’s Front Range with North American Rodents: Landscapes, Ecology, and Evolution collaborators. Members participated in daily workshop discussions and field site visits, including Pawnee National Grassland, Rocky Mountain National Park, and Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument. |
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| In the News |
Check out Heather Lynch’s interview with Beth Watson for the Collaborative for the Earth (C4E) podcast:
Heather Lynch, E&E faculty member and director of the Collaborative for the Earth, regularly interviews changemakers as part of the "C4E Presents" podcast.
In addition to this interview of E&E faculty Beth Watson, Heather has completed several podcast interviews you may find of interest! |
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Emeritus professor Jeff Levinton served as a distinguished panelist for a discussion on Restorative Aquaculture in Great South Bay as part of the "Save the Great South Bay" Speaker Series. |
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| Community Outreach |
| Faculty member Jackie Weissman has been working with community members at GenSpace, a community biology laboratory in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and the Billion Oyster Project to help them study the environmental microbes living in the waters around artificial oyster reefs being built at Bush Terminal Piers Park. This work has recently been funded by ConEd and experiment.com. |
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MA student Joseph Acosta has been working with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation on public outreach and education to combat invasive aquatic species. He's been stationed at boat ramps across Long Island, informing the public about the threat of species like water chestnut and Hydrilla. He's also participated in water chestnut pulls at Massapequa Lake and assisted the Freshwater division with various tasks. |
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In recognition of #SuicidePreventionMonth, E&E faculty, staff, and students came together to paint “Rocks of Hope” sponsored by the Center for Prevention and Outreach and Student Health and Wellness. These rocks, filled with positive messages, will be placed around campus to spread hope and support. |
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| Publication Highlights |
E&E faculty Tara Smiley has a new paper, "Tectonic extension and paleoelevation influence mammalian diversity dynamics in the Basin and Range Province of western North America" in Science Advances, for which she is the lead author with Department of Geosciences collaborators William Holt and E. Troy Rasbury. The paper discusses integrating geologic and fossil records to understand how mountain building generated and maintained high biodiversity in the past.
See more of our publications, here. |
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An international team of researchers including Professor Ross Nehm published a perspective in Science, calling for re-envisioning genetics education. |
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Madeline Halle presented her MA capstone research on Macaroni penguin populations in Antarctica at the Pacific Seabird Group conference. Her work, now published in Polar Biology, estimates an increase in the Antarctic population since the last regional census. |
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In a new article in Molecular Biology & Evolution titled "Wiring between close nodes in molecular networks evolves more quickly than between distant nodes," PhD student Alex Gil Gomez and Associate Professor and chair Joshua Rest explored drug interactions as a proxy for studying network evolution in gram-negative bacteria. |
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Postdoctoral researcher Paul Barrett investigated a common belief that cat-like carnivores are limited in their variety. The study, published in Royal Society Open Science, found that while some features might be more limited, others show surprising variation. For example, hypercarnivores (meat-eaters) have less tooth variation but more skull variation, suggesting adaptation in different ways. This research challenges the idea of "all cats looking the same" and highlights the ecological diversity within cat-like carnivores. |
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Faculty Liliana Davalos and postdoc Bill Thomas caught a Jamaican fruit bat on the first night of their expedition to the Dominican Republic. As published in mSphere with collabors from Charité Berlin, this discovery has yielded a distinct lineage of Tacaribe virus, a clade of arenaviruses known from only four wild isolates. |
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| Conference Spotlight |
| Our E&E graduate students made a strong impression at the Ecological Society of America conference in Long Beach this summer. Nicolas Anderson, Urmi Poddar, Jack Chaillet and Carlos Morantes Ariza (pictured here with faculty Rafael D'Andrea) all presented their research, showcasing the exceptional work being done in our Department. |
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Sixto Taveras Lopez presented a poster "Evaluating Ecosystem Services of Coastal Marsh Restoration in Barnegat Bay, NJ" at the New England Estuarine Research Society (NEERS) conference in Freeport, Maine. |
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PhD student Imogene Welles shared her dissertation research on white-footed mouse populations and their isotopic niche dynamics in the Long Island Central Pine Barrens at the American Society of Mammalogists annual meeting in
Boulder, CO.
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Evan Abreu along with alum Gena Sbeglia presented "A quasi-experimental study of the differential impacts of explanation construction vs. explanation critique on evolution learning" at the National Association for Research in Science Teaching in Denver, CO.
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| Thank you for your support! |
Our Department is a hub for groundbreaking research and mentorship, nurturing the next generation of scientists. Your generosity empowers our students to excel and fuels innovative projects that are shaping our world. You can make a difference by contributing to the Department Excellence Fund. Your gift directly supports student scholarships and research funds, colloquia, and faculty research needs. You may also wish to learn about our other funds. If you are interested in supporting a specific research project led by one of our faculty members or students, please get in touch!
We also value connections with our alumni and friends. Let us know what you've been up to! Share your stories and career updates with us at ecoevo_office@stonybrook.edu. |
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| Now is a perfect time to amplify the impact of your philanthropy, as current matching gift opportunities at Stony Brook may triple the impact of certain endowment donations to our programs. To learn more about which donations qualify for the matches, contact Michael D'Ambrosio, Senior Director of Development, to explore these opportunities. |
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