Associates

Mentors

Claire Kremen, PhD

Claire has had an expansive career, spanning conservation planning in Madagascar to native bee restoration in California’s Central Valley. She has also mentored numerous graduate students and post-docs who have gone on to do their own amazing work. She is a co-founder of Berkeley’s Center for Diversified Farming, an organization which reflects her interest in researching practical farming techniques that have the ability to bolster ecosystem services to agriculture, making farm systems more resilient.  Kremen Lab Webpage

Neal Williams, PhD

Neal, a professor in the entomology department at UC Davis, provides his expertise to my projects. His work focused on pollinator conservation in both natural and agricultural landscapes. Williams Lab Webpage

Collaborators

Kelly Garbach, PhD

Kelly is a professor in the Environmental Science department at Loyola University Chicago. Garbach Bio. Her research evaluates relationships between social processes, environmental policies, and ecological outcomes in agricultural ecosystems. Together with Rachael Long (UC Cooperative adviser for Yolo Co.), we are coordinating the Hedgerow Workgroup, whose purpose is to synthesize information on the multifunctional benefits of field-scale diversification techniques, such as hedgerows and forb strips.

Lora Morandin, PhD

Lora has been working in Yolo County’s hedgerows for the past 5 years. Previously she worked in Canada examining pollination of canola, including the impact of local and landscape level habitat diversity. Her work laid the groundwork for my current research.

Leithen M’Gonigle, PHD

While Leithen has worked on a variety of topics, from evolutionary ecology to sexual selection, he is currently focused on occupancy analyses in collaboration with the Kremen’s lab hedgerow project. Leithen’s webpage

Lauren C. Ponisio

Lauren has a B.S. and M.S. from Stanford where she studied butterfly movement in the Rocky Mountains. She is interested in bipartite networks. Her current projects, with Dr. Kremen, include examining network topology in hedgerow systems, looking at network evolution in high alpine meadows in Arizona, and determining the effects of fire on pollinator community composition.

Katharina Ullmann

Katharina is a graduate student in UC Davis’ department of entomology studying with Neal Williams. She studies squash bees, specialist pollinators of cucurbits. We work together on outreach materials.

Margaret “Rei” Scampavia

Rei is also a graduate student at UC Davis with Ed Lewis and Neal Williams. She studies sunflower bee nesting in enclosures- her work is highly complimentary to mine, on top of being very innovative and interesting.

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects  

Kaysee Tom

Kaysee’s senior thesis used mark-release-recapture techniques via florescent dye to examining how far bees penetrate into crops from field margins. She just finished a MPA at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Ashley Ellis

Ashley started as a SPUR intern in our lab, and moved on to conducting her senior thesis project on the nocturnal pollinators of sunflower, mainly moths. In the past she worked with Barry Brosi monitoring native bee populations.

Collette Yee

Collette worked as an intern in our lab for over a year. She was awarded a Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP) summer award as well as a Sponsored Projects Undergraduate Research award to carry out her senior thesis research on the impact of irrigation (flood versus drip) on native bee nesting within sunflower fields. Her poster about her research won first prize for in the undergraduate category at the 2014 Pacific Branch Entomology Conference in Tucson, AZ.

Megan Jackson

Megan worked with Dr. Celine Pallud, Dr. Nathan McClintock and I on a project examining whether lead contamination in soils in East Bay Regional Parks in Oakland affected populations of native bees. Besides her senior thesis research, Megan spends her time teaching children the wonders of gardening at elementary schools in El Cerrito, CA.

 

Past Field Assistants

Shelly Bennett

Alyssa Hernandez

Sophie Hyson

Rachael Jaffee

Tim Luttermoser

Brendan Sostak

Riley Waytes

Past Interns (programs are Undergraduate Research Assistance Program URAP, Sponsored Projects Undergraduate Research SPUR, and Biology Scholars Program (BSP)

Jose Alanis-Regalado, URAP

Eleni Baskin, URAP

Kendall Calhoun, BSP

Julie Choung, URAP

Brandon Cowan, URAP

Michelle Davis, URAP

Lilah Gonan, SPUR

Megan Jackson, URAP

Nina John, URAP

Ryan Koh, URAP

Sandy Li, SPUR

Afsaneh Mortazavi, URAP

Taichi Nasaki, SPUR

Emily Stone, SPUR

Jennifer Urban, URAP

Christian Vazquez, URAP

Stephanie Wright, URAP

Rebecca Wynd, URAP

Angela Zetter, URAP