Lab Alumni

Richard received his B.S. in Biology with emphasis in Ecology and Evolution and minor in GIS from Cal State Northridge, where he continues his masters research. He is studying post-wildfire plant community succession from the 2018 Woolsey fire in the Santa Monica Mountains. Invasive species, disturbance, distributions, and remotely sensed data are all things that he thinks about academically. Richard is the Los Angeles County Volunteer Coordinator for the Western Monarch Count with Xerces Society, and when he isn’t surveying monarchs, he’s advocating for native plants and posting on iNaturalist. Richard finished with his M.S. in 2022 and moved on to a PhD Program at Boise State!

Cam started in the lab in Fall 2019 and graduated in 2022. She took off to do a Fulbright in New Zealand in 2020, which was sadly cut short by the pandemic. Her thesis focused on how plant-soil feedbacks affect invasive plant success, exploring this with both models and experiments. She is now in a PhD program at University of Aukland!

Chelsea was a graduate student in the lab from 2018-2021. She graduated from Eastern Connecticut University, where she worked with CSUN alum, Josh Idjadi. She examined how bacteria affect the performance of different genotypes of Symbiodinium, an important algal symbiont on coral reefs. She is also interested in how bacteria affect the interactions between algal symbionts and their coral hosts. In her spare time, Chelsea is an avid hiker and fan of anything outdoors, having spent time before grad school hiking the entire Appalachian Trail. She is currently working as a teacher and outdoor educator in Colorado.

Lissandra worked in the lab in 2019, primarily on the Symbiodinium project.

Catalina joined the lab in summer 2016, having graduated from Mathew Leibold's lab at Univ. Texas, Austin. She was a shared post-doc with Tom Miller, but is primarily based at Florida State University. She is studying the community ecology of the microbial inquiline communities of pitcher plants. Catalina began her position as Assistant Professor at Humboldt State starting in Fall 2018!

Emily started working in the lab in Summer 2018 and examined trait variation in Symbiodinium.

Peter's webpage

As a post-doc, Peter worked to understand the consequences of trait evolution in ecological communities, collaboratively with the terHorst lab and Sebastian Schreiber (UC Davis). He has broad interests across community ecology and evolutionary biology, with a particular interest in interactions at community, social, and genetic levels. Before arriving at CSUN, Peter was a postdoc with Tad Fukami at Stanford and a PhD student at Indiana University with Jim Bever and Greg Velicer. Peter is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Mississippi.

Zoë graduated from the University of California Santa Barbara with a B.S. in Aquatic Biology. Her childhood love for the ocean grew into a desire to study how local adaptation in invasive species affects the ecology of the community, completing the feedback loop between the ecological and evolutionary forces acting on community structure. She completed her M.S. in 2017 and now works as a marine biologist for the City of San Diego.

Shannon's Webpage

Shannon graduated from CSUN in 2016. Her thesis focused on the interplay between ecological and evolutionary processes. She examined how nutrient availability modifies the effects of species and genetic diversity on community performance in the symbiotic dinoflagellate, Symbiodinium. Shannon is a strong proponent of unconventional science communication and in the future hopes to extend the broader impacts of her research to a larger audience through photography and other creative mediums. She is now a graduate student in Joe Bailey's lab at University of Tennessee. As she graduated CSUN, Shannon received the Bianchi Award for Outstanding Graduate Student from the Biology Department.

Cameron worked as an undergraduate in the lab in 2014-2015.