After discovering my passion for freshwater ecology and marine biology as a Lawrence undergraduate, I continued developing these interests by studying evolutionary ecology of zooplankton, food web interactions in the Baltic Sea, Green Bay (WI), and Lake Baikal (Russia), as well as examining how climate change could affect physics, fishes and plankton of lake ecosystems. My students and I have continued examining how human-related changes are affecting lakes through our studies on changes in food webs following invasions by non-native fish, plankton and benthic invertebrates, as well as due to climate change. By employing studies from the level of the physiology and behavior of individuals with different genetic backgrounds to modeling whole food web dynamics we hope to provide a synthetic view of ecological and evolutionary dynamics of lake ecosystems in our changing world.
I regularly offer courses in Introductory Biology, General Ecology, Aquatic Ecology, Ecological Modeling, Ecological Energetics and Food Webs, Coral Reef Environments (Marine Term), Environmental Studies Senior Seminar, First-Year Studies, and Tutorials/Directed Studies on topics related to marine biology.
