Graduate Research

Palash Mandal is a doctoral candidate in COLSA's agricultural sciences PhD program. He expects to receive his degree in May, 2025.

Jill is exploring how acoustic behavior shifts in response to environmental variation, aiming to balance the needs of people, wildlife, and ecosystems.

Miguel de Jesus Gomez Garcia believes that modern quantitative methods can significantly enhance our comprehension of ecosystems and help address complex conservation and management questions that have proved challenging thus far.

Mikayla Cote examines the influence of marine microzooplankton grazing on the production/consumption of transparent exopolymer particles (TEP) and marine aggregates in general.

Faith Frings is interested in developing methods for increasing quantitative literacy in biology courses at the undergraduate level.

Valerie Eddington is studying the integration of acoustic and quantitative ecology to investigate new methods for monitoring dense populations of animals.

Andrew (Drew) Villeneuve (he/him/his) is a global change marine ecologist interested in working with data across scales of ecological organization to better understand the effects of climate change on marine ecosystems and the people that depend on them.

Researcher Matt Tyler interested in the long-term effects non-native algae and sessile animals will have on intertidal and subtidal communities in the Gulf of Maine, and what role they will play in facilitating or resisting future invasions.

Researcher Aliya Caldwell GOM-breeding Common Terns and the forage fishes they rely on, which include species of herring, hake, and sand lance among others.

Daniel Mitchell studies the persistence and retention of undergraduate biology students with a special focus on high-impact learning practices, supports/barriers, and transfer students.

Taja Sims-Harper is a doctoral student in the marine biology Ph.D. program. She conducts research on microplastics in oysters and other marine life in Great Bay in the lab of Bonnie Brown, professor of ecological genetics and the chair of the department of biological sciences.

Researcher Alyssa Stasse uses genetic techniques, such as genome and transcriptome sequencing, to determine differences between populations of eastern oysters.