While I'm an entomologist at heart, I'm trained as an ecologist. Working at a small, primarily undergraduate institution, I find opportunities to work with great students who may not share my love of arthropods. For example, I'm piloting a long-term deer survey program as a means to support student interest in wildlife biology. Learn more about it on my Research page.

I will be incorporating instruction on the R statistical program in my Fall 2018 Ecology course thanks to an opportunity to participate in the QUBES (Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis) Faculty Mentoring Network for 'Reducing Barriers to Teaching with R in Undergraduate Biology'. The ability to use the R statistical program is increasingly a requirement for undergraduate internships and employment in addition to being useful for undergraduate and graduate research. I'm excited to introduce this program to my students and hope to expand instruction on R at Lycoming College in the future.

We've been busy working on several projects this summer that include the second year of a student honors thesis work and the preliminary development of another undergraduate honors thesis. Ruric Bowman and Brittany Lenze are working this summer a research assistants with some additional help from new student Bailey Schwenk. We've been out catching adult insects in the Mosquito Creek watershed to determine if adult stream insects move into the forest canopy as adults and helping out on a bunch of other project examining forest communities and aquatic macroinvertebrates. The most exciting development is that Brittany Lenze's field experiment examining the effect of warming on Canada Thistle (and invasive plant species) is up and running. We'll be checking temperatures to be sure the black plastic is warming the soil as we hope, and we now have a full set of backup plants on the ready in case the thistles in the experiment fail to grow (which, itself, may be an important result). More to come as the field season moves along ...

Couldn't be more proud of my research students who presented posters of their summer research. They got great feedback, and it certainly helped my ego to hear my colleagues talk about how much they liked their posters. The entire CWI crew did a great job at the meeting.

Several Lycoming students, including some from my lab, will be presenting work at the 12th annual Susquehanna River Symposium on November 10-11, 2017 at Bucknell University. The theme for this year's meeting is "The Spirit of Two Great Rivers: The Susquehanna and Delaware". Check out the details of the meeting HERE.