2024 Faculty Members:
Faculty Profile:
Research Interests:
Insect-Microbe Interactions
Research Focus:
Expertise, Research Methods and Data Used:
Equipment Used:
Equipment Needed:
Collaborator Interests and Skills Desired:
Faculty Profile:
Research Interests:
Fisheries Management; Movement; Habitat Use; Thermal Ecology; Age and Growth
Research Focus:
My research interests broadly focus on movement ecology of fishes, and how that information can be used to assess and manage populations. Within that, I am particularly interested in habitat use of fishes throughout their life history, the connectivity of key habitats (spawning, nursery, overwintering) in fragmented systems, and how current thermal habitat availability and use may change in a changing climate. The questions I focus on are often informed by specific management needs identified by state and federal agencies.
Expertise, Research Methods and Data Used:
I often use telemetry (acoustic or radio) to address research questions, but integrate that technique with various other laboratory and field-based methods in fisheries science, including hydroacoustics, age and growth analysis, and conventional tagging.
Equipment Used:
Acoustic telemetry stationary receivers
Equipment Needed:
Hydroacoustic equipment (side scan sonar, other types of sonars used in habitat mapping and fish observation)
Collaborator Interests and Skills Desired:
I can see potential collaborations with faculty that have expertise in water resources, particularly related to hydropower or floodplain connectivity, and faculty working on predicting the effects of climate change on flow and temperature regimes.
Faculty Profile:
Research Interests:
Plant Pathosystems
Research Focus:
Expertise, Research Methods and Data Used:
Equipment Used:
Equipment Needed:
Collaborator Interests and Skills Desired:
Faculty Profile:
Research Interests:
Host immune response; small ruminants; helminth parasites
Research Focus:
In our lab, we use a sheep model to investigate host immune responses against helminth parasites to understand 1) host-pathogen dynamics in the gastrointestinal tract 2) immuneometabolic regulation and 3) immune signaling pathways.
Expertise, Research Methods and Data Used:
We use cell isolation and culture along with immune assays such as ELISAs, cell migration and proliferation. We also use next generation sequencing to understand immune cell transcriptomes, and metabolic function using mitochondrial stress tests, amongst other techniques.
Equipment Used:
A wide array of general lab equipment to facilitate microbiology, cell culture, parasite culture, imaging and transcriptomic analysis.
Equipment Needed:
Flow cytometer
Collaborator Interests and Skills Desired:
I’m always keen to collaborate with other faculty interested in animal physiology, particularly regarding health and disease management.
Faculty Profile:
Research Interests:
Wild Plant – Pathogen Coevolution in Natural Ecosystems
Research Focus:
Severe disease epidemics in wild plant pathosystems are rare when compared to crop pathosystems. Genetic heterogeneity of the hosts is a significant feature of wild plant populations. It presumably plays a major role in suppressing the emergence of novel pathogen virulence. My lab aims to understand how the genetic makeup of wild grape populations in the Blue Ridge Mountains influences its coevolution with a highly coevolved downy mildew-causing pathogen and vice versa. We integrate fields of genomics, population and evolutionary genomics, computational biology, ecology, and plant pathology. My lab’s long-term goal is to learn evolutionary principles from wild plant pathosystems that will be useful in managing crop diseases sustainably.
Expertise, Research Methods and Data Used:
Evolutionary Plant Pathology, My lab uses genomics, population and evolutionary genomics, computational biology, and plant pathology methods. We work with whole-genome sequencing data generated with short-read (High-throughput) and long-read sequencing technologies. The lab also analyzes ecological data of the sampled area and also integrates host-pathogen interactions phenotyping data generated in the laboratory setting.
Equipment Used:
A dedicated compute node in OIT, Oxford Nanopore MinION sequencer, a plant growth incubator
Equipment Needed:
DNA Sequencing library-prep robot, Off-road truck
Collaborator Interests and Skills Desired:
Viticulture, Mathematical and ecological modeling, molecular biology.
