About

Diverse skills, backgrounds and perspectives increase our ability to successfully tackle scientific questions in creative ways (see research quantifying this here). I am committed to providing a safe and equitable lab environment; I expect all lab members to be respectful of each other. Actions that I take to accomplish this include maintaining a document with explicit expectations of lab members (see here) and having trimesterly check-ins with each lab member that reflect on goals (including equity work) and challenges within the lab and lab citizenship, and making sure lab members have someone outside of their power hierarchy they feel comfortable reporting within lab challenges to (see here).

Our research aims to understand the factors that drive organisms to move and what consequences movement has for individuals, species, and communities.

Read the CBS blog posts about the lab and research here and the prairie dispersal project here.

See more about the Biological Theory Alliance (BioTA) at University of Minnesota here.

Upcoming

Sep-2020	Martha Torstenson is joining the lab and EEB to start her PhD
TBD	Allison and Naven are (virtually?) attending a workshop on mathematics for evolution during range expansions at the Fields Institute in Toronto

Recent news & events

Jul-2020	Lindsay's paper won the 2020 Population Ecology Young Author Award - Congrats!!
Jun-2020	Naven's paper on how infection status can affect migration was accepted in Oikos!
Jun-2020	lab alum Laurie is back (virtually) for the summer to work on another modeling project
May-2020	preprint posted to medRxiv looking at how movement ecology can inform our understanding of COVID-19 spread
May-2020	Damon graduated and is off to better things (whenever better things are possible again). Congrats!!
May-2020	Allison was granted tenure and is now an Associate Professor!
Feb-2020	Review paper on the causes and consequences of individual variation in animal movement was accepted in Movement Ecology
Jan-2020	Ranjan and Lauren's paper, with James on how plasticity affects coexistence under competition-colonization tradeoffs was accepted in Ecology Letters
Jan-2020	New paper with Sandra on the relative selective pressures of migratory recovery and social migratory escape was accepted in Journal of Animal Ecology
Dec-2019	Damon's paper with Topher and Allison on stochasticity and population extinction was accepted in Ecosphere
Dec-2019	Allison gave a seminar in the Biology Department at Emory University
Nov-2019	Paper with Ben Ashby and Hanna Kokko on how dispersal can drive diversity by shaping rates of speciation was accepted in Oikos
Oct-2019	Allison gave a seminar in the Biology Department at Boston University
Oct-2019	Allison attended a workshop on Advancing Ecological Theory at Penn State University
Oct-2019	Amanda Gorton started a CBS Grand Challenges in Biology Postdoc on the causes and consequences of ragweed pollen distribution in urban areas, working with our lab and with Jesse Berman (in Environmental Health Sciences) and Bonnie Keeler (in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs)
Sep-2019	Lab alum Dennis Kim re-joined the lab and EEB to start his PhD.
Aug-2019	Lab representation at ESA (Ecological Society of America) 2019! Naven talked about migration strategy can depend on infection status, Lauren talked about how dispersal variation change estimates of population connectivity, and Topher talked about how genetic structure influences dispersal evolution during range shifts.
Jul-2019	Katie's paper with Lauren on species spillover in grasslands is out in Journal of Applied Ecology
Jul-2019	Topher's paper on climate-induced range shifts was accepted in The American Naturalist
Jul-2019	Lindsay's paper on how facilitation and competition shape seed dormancy was accepted in Population Ecology
Jul-2019	Katie wrapped up her technician position in the lab and is off to grad school in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Northeastern. Congrats!!
Jun-2019	Katie launched her Connectivity App which allows users to explore connectivity across Minnesota's grasslands. Check it out!
Jun-2019	Katie's paper with Allison, and Lauren on the use of Apps in restoration was accepted in Restoration Ecology
Jun-2019	Allison gave a talk at the EEID (Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases) 2019 Conference in Princeton, NJ
May-2019	Laurie joined the lab for the summer to work on a modeling project related to migration and parasites as part of the NSF grant with Meggan Craft, Marlene Zuk, and Sandra Binning
May-2019	Julie graduated and is off to grad school in math at the University of Utah Congrats!!
May-2019	Kate defended her PhD in math and is off to a postdoc position at Cornell University, then will be coming back to the area next year to start a faculty position at Carleton College. Congrats!!
May-2019	Paper with Meggan Craft, Marlene Zuk, and Sandra Binning looking at how the forms of parasite transmission and infection cost shape host migration strategy was accepted in Journal of Animal Ecology
May-2019	Topher Weiss-Lehman moved to the University of Wyoming where he will be starting a faculty position in the Botany Department. Congrats!!
Apr-2019	Katie Sperry was awarded an NSF GRFP. Congrats!
Mar-2019	Paper by lab alum Lauren Shoemaker, with Evelyn Hayhurst, Topher Weiss-Lehman, Alex Strauss, Anita Porath-Krause, Elizabeth Borer, and Eric Seabloom looking at pathogen manipulation of vectors was accepted in Ecology Letters
Mar-2019	Paper by lab alum Morganne Igoe, with Sunny Power, Nilsa Bosque-Perez and Angie Peace, looking at how modeling approach shapes the outcomes for vector-borne pathogen spread was accepted in Bulletin of Mathematical Biology
Mar-2019	Paper with Pete Buston and Cass D'Aloia looking at how landscape structure affects dispersal kernel evolution is out in Am Nat here
Mar-2019	Allison led a session on causes and consequences of variation in animal movement at the 2019 Movement Ecology of Animals Gordon Research Conference in Italy
Jan-2019	Lauren Sullivan started a new position as an Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Missouri. Congrats!!