Wetlands (photo courtesy Peter Griffin)
The Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics Focus Group includes faculty with expertise in population biology and evolution. Special strengths within this group include biogeography, life history evolution, phylogenetic systematics, conservation, evolutionary genetics, and Neotropical ecology. Graduate students have available to them experts in DNA sequencing, allozyme electrophoresis, multivariate statistics, mathematical modeling, cladistic phylogenetic reconstruction, and numerous field sites.
Faculty frequently collaborate to offer seminar discussion courses at the graduate level. Several lecture-based graduate courses are offered by the faculty, including Behavioral Ecology (Anderson) and Foundations of Ecology (Silman and Anderson).
The faculty welcome applications from potential graduate students that build on ongoing research programs as well as from applicants proposing new research directions related to faculty expertise. Please feel free to contact any faculty member in the Department of Biology to explore possibilities for MS and PhD research.