Lauren C. Ponisio
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My research aim is to discover new insights into how communities form, evolve, and persist through time and space, aiding in the prediction and prevention of community collapse. I combine modeling, synthesis and field-based work, and adhere to the principles of reproducible, open science.
In addition, my personal connection to issues concerning agriculture sustainability as a native of the Central Valley and Latina woman has motivated me to study how to design agricultural systems to better support humans and wildlife. I have investigated strategies for designing agricultural systems to promote biodiversity conservation and the links between conservation strategies and improving livelihoods. Beyond promoting biological diversity, my second mission in life is to increase human diversity in the sciences. Because people draw upon their life experiences to inform their science, a diversity of backgrounds is necessary to promote the advancement of science. |
Rebecca Hayes |
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PhD student
Rebecca received her bachelor’s degree from University of Pittsburgh where she worked on creating plant-pollinator networks in California serpentine seep communities. Staying on as a research technician at University of Pittsburgh following her graduation, she completed a project exploring relationships between floral UV patterns and flower microbe UV tolerance to understand how traits usually thought to aid in pollinator attraction also influence the plant microbiome. Most recently, she worked at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab contributing data to a 48-year long survey of alpine floral phenology. For her Ph.D., Rebecca is interested in research at the interface of plant-pollinator-microbe interactions and conservation. |
Emmanuelle Brito |
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Visiting PhD student, CAPES – UFG Brazil
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Nicole Martinez |
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PhD student
Nicole's general interest is in ecological interactions, entomology, and botany. She is from Puerto Rico where she studied the effects and changes in community dynamics on plant-pollinator interaction networks caused by hurricanes. Nicole is mainly interested in plant-pollinator interactions and how those interactions can be affected by different variables such as invasive species, natural disasters, and anthropogenic disturbances. She am also interested in how pollinators as driver of natural selection can influence breeding systems in plants. |
Jess Fan Brown |
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Masters student
Jess received their bachelor's degree in Ecology from UC Santa Cruz, where they studied competition dynamics between honeybees and native pollinator species in Anza-Borrego State Park. They have worked extensively on scrubland habitat restoration in the Zayante sandhills, Santa Cruz coastal dunes, and Marin Headlands. Jess is fascinated by oligolectic and habitat-specialist bees and is interested in the potential of landscape-scale habitat restoration to buffer specialized bee species against local extinction. For their masters, they will be surveying Northwest forests to examine pollinator resource use in landscapes that are intensively managed for timber harvest. |
Hamutahl Cohen
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Contact:
hamutahlc@gmail.com |
Post-doctoral scholar
Hamutahl received her Ph.D. at UC Santa Cruz in Environmental Studies. Her research is motivated by the fact that bees are dying. Bees pollinate important crops in California’s farms and gardens, and agricultural landscapes, in turn, provision resources for bees: pollen and nectar for food and materials and ground substrate for nesting habitat. Through resource provisioning, landscape context impacts bee health: those bees with access to food and habitat are healthier. But landscape context also has epidemiological importance for bees. As a bee forages across landscapes for food, it acquires pollen and nectar-vectored beneficial and pathogenic microorganisms. Her research therefore addresses how variation in floral resources influences bee health. She works in both urban and rural systems with wild and domesticated bees to assess how management and landscape context influence bee-microbe and bee-pathogen interactions. She relies on a combination of field experiments and molecular techniques and to conduct research. In the Ponisio lab she is learning how to apply ecological network analyses to understand the distribution of parasites in wild bees and how this is impacted by both functional traits of different bee species but also by habitat management. |
Jennie Durant
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Post-doctoral scholar
Jennie is a social scientist interested in agrifood systems, with a focus on transitions to diversified farming and socially just food production. Jennie received her PhD at University of California, Berkeley in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, and an M.F.A. in nonfiction from Saint Mary’s College of California. Her cross-disciplinary research focuses on agrifood systems at national and global scales, and draws from geography, rural sociology, and environmental science. Jennie’s current and past research contributes to debates on drivers behind pollinator vulnerability. Her PhD research investigated how commercial beekeepers changed their management practices as the California almond industry–most commercial beekeepers’ primary source of pollination revenue–expanded three-fold from 1990-2016. Her methods included in-depth interviews, surveys, and participant observation, as well as analysis of historical documents and agricultural statistics. In the Ponisio Lab, Jennie is deepening her focus on the almond industry, a bee-dependent crop, by investigating the barriers and incentives to adopting bee-friendly practices on almond orchards through qualitative research and an industry-wide survey. |
Gordon Smith
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Post-doctoral scholar
I study the causes and consequences of within-species variation in pollinator behavior. Behavior is one of the most plastic and variable responses organisms have to their environment, and differences in an individual's behavior can have large fitness consequences both for that individual and for other species it interacts with. This is especially true in plant-pollinator interactions, as plants rely heavily on mutualistic pollen vectors to reproduce. My research focuses on a number of questions: 1) How much do pollinator individuals vary in their foraging behavior? 2) How this variation is distributed over space and time? 3) What are the drivers underlying this variation? and 4) How does this variation influence the outcomes of these interactions? |
Jocelyn Zorn
Contact: jocelynz at uoregon
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Lab manager
Jocelyn is a molecular ecology specialist. She received her bachelor's degree from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied ecology and classical guitar. Before joining the Ponisio Lab, Jocelyn interned for the Lewis B. and Dorothy J. Cullman Program for Molecular Systematics at the New York Botanical Garden. While at the New York Botanical Garden, Jocelyn assisted with research on the systematics and evolution of Characeae, a lineage of freshwater green algae. She has conducted field research in the USA, Costa Rica, and Panama. Jocelyn is interested in plant-insect interactions, pollination ecology, and plant taxonomy. |
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Lab alumni |
