Welcome

I am a scientist (to be specific an applied plant and community ecologist trained as a weed scientist) currently teaching and doing research at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. I am a Washington DC native, but was born in Nepal and spent most of my childhood in Indonesia and Ethiopia. Ever since I was a kid I have loved science, music and sports - but my dreams of being a soccer player were humbled on the dirt fields of Addis Ababa, and my passion for plant science won out in the long run.

I've taught a wide range of courses, including introductory auto-tutorial Biology at Cornell University, and Plant Biology, Plants and Civilization and Ecology and Management of Weeds at Colorado State University. I'm in the midst of an exciting and challenging teaching and research postdoctoral position at Trinity College (Hartford, CT) as the Thomas McKenna Meredith '48 Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Sciences. It's a great program (see their webpage here) with exceptionally talented and motivated students. At Trinity I'm teaching Introduction to Environmental Science - take a look at our ongoing Science in the Media blogging project from this - an Environmental Science Research Methods course built around a semester-long field research project, and also a new self-designed course on Biological Invasions.

While I'm most experienced in designing and carrying out quantitative ecological field research, I also have extensive analytical laboratory skills gained from studying the environmental fate of pesticides and other pollutants. I've worked in diverse ecosystems, from early successional fields to forests and saltwater marshes in the northeast, and arid western U.S. rangeland and riparian systems. Most of my past research has focused on understanding and minimizing the ecological and environmental impacts of invasive plant management efforts. More recently I've begun related research focused on determining the impact that specific types of invasive species - namely vines and shrubs - play in altering community assembly processes and the effect these impacts have on the functional value of affected communities. My lab group has 6-8 undergraduate students working both on my primary research but also other related projects (check out our ongoing work at Trinitycology) such as:

Abiotic drivers of plant community assembly
Role of invasive woody species assemblages - and the impacts of their removal - in altering the functional value of coastal woodlands
Development of habitat and bird species educational signs for Knox Preserve, Mystic (CT)
Developing a bike route map for Hartford as part of a broader proposal for a bike friendlier city

Contact me at cameron.douglass@gmail.com.

For more information about me and my work visit my research blog.

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