Graduate Students

Chris Dibble

Chris got is undergraduate degree from Denison and is co-advised by Ken Whitney. He is broadly interested in speciation and how local adaptation and evolutionary history influence the structure of natural communities (and how salamanders might taste).

Nick Rasmussen

Nick received his MS from U. Kansas. He is broadly interested in everything, and more recently in the role of phenology and size-structure in community assembly.

Benjamin Van Allen

Ben arrived at Rice with a Masters from VCU and now faces intense food competition with Nick. He is interested in the role of complex life-cycles for population and community dynamics.

 

Undergraduate Students

Pablo Delclos

Pablo is a century scholar and joined the group because he likes to get out of the lab and work in the field to dip-net local ponds. For his independent research project Pablo examines how habitat and size-structure determine predator interference and predation rates.

Ye jin Kang

Despite working crazy hours, Ye jin still finds plenty of time to work on her independent research that examines host-pathogen interactions in different environments.

Lauren Krenek

Lauren has been working with us for a while on a variety of projects on predator-prey interactions. She now works on her senior thesis project on predator interference in backsimmers. She is on her way to leave the exciting world of research and instead become a rich family doctor after finishing med school at Baylor.

Sarah Nouri

Sarah is the newest member of the group. For her senior research project she is examining how size-structured interactions between competing species influence colonization success and extinction rates.

Stephanie Price

When Stephanie is not on call as an EMS, she works on her senior project on the immune response of flour beetles.

 

Lab Alumni

Ann Thomas

Ann was smitten with flour beetles and their intestinal parasites, and showed in her senior thesis that immune memory persist across metamorphosis and protects invertebrate hosts from parasites across different life-stages. Ann has moved on to Princeton to pursue a PhD working on infectious diseases.
 

Whitney Parson

For her senior thesis Whitney worked on the interaction between kin recognition, reproductive status and cannibalistic behavior. Now she is in peace corps and travels the world.