Environmental Health

This study will contrast the extraction of DNA/RNA from aerosols collected with electrostatic precipitation (a relatively new collection method) with a common membrane filtration protocol to identify the most appropriate method for future regional and global scale aerobiology research projects.

The principals of conservation biology are waiting to be applied to restore native coregonines in the Great Lakes. Native fishes have suffered extinctions and extirpations owing to loss of habitat, interactions with invasive species, and overfishing, and now fishery managers are committed to their restoration.

The topic of how climate change will exacerbate the impacts of invasive species is at the cutting edge of conservation biology and applied ecology. We are looking for someone to work with a group of researchers and natural resource managers under the paradigm of translational ecology, producing publications and designing research that will improve conservation outcomes on the ground

The USGS and the Smithsonian Institution have initiated the first in situ active aboveground and belowground warming experiment in a coastal wetland that is focused on wetland temperature responses and also examines the interaction between warming, elevated CO2, and inundation frequency on wetland resilience in the face of changes in global change drivers.

Plants and insects comprise a large portion of problematic invasive species. The success of these invasions largely depends on the outcomes of plant-insect interactions in which plants that escape herbivores may be more successful invaders, and herbivores that find adequate hosts have the opportunity to establish. This project will explore the dynamics of introduced plant or insect populations, or

Spend a summer on the shore of Lake Michigan, investigating the role that dynamic dune disturbance and successional processes play in the spatial metapopulation dynamics of Pitcher’s thistle, a federally threatened plant. This project will provide a basis for developing spatial population models that can indicate the present and future conditions for the species in the Great Lakes.

Molecular methods such as quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) allow scientists the ability to target specific genes allowing for a rapid, sensitive, and cost-effective way to determine the presence and relative abundance of potential pathogen genes in the environment. Although there are many benefits to qPCR such as not relying on the ability to culture fastidious microorganisms ...