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Former Postdocs
Former Postdocs
Dr. Norman Lee, Ph.D. University of Toronto 2012
Currently:
Assistant Professor
Department of Biology
St. Olaf College
Dr. Jessica Ward, Ph.D. University of Toronto 2009
Currently:
Assistant Professor
Department of Biology
Ball State University
Dr. Michael Caldwell, Ph.D. Boston University 2009
Currently:
Assistant Professor
Department of Biology
Gettysburg College
Dr. Noah Gordon, Ph.D., University of Missouri, 2008
Currently:
Associate Professor
Department of Biology
University of Evansville
Dr. Noah Gordon, Ph.D., University of Missouri, 2008
Currently:
Associate Professor
Department of Biology
University of Evansville
Dr. Katie LaBarbera, Ph.D. Univ. of California Berkeley 2016
Currently:
Senior Biologist
San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory
Dr. Vivek Nityananda, Ph.D., Indian Inst. of Science, 2009
Currently:
BBSRC David Phillips Fellow at the Centre for Behaviour and Evolution
Biosciences Institute, Newcastle University, UK
Former Graduate Students
Former Graduate Students
Saumya Gupta, Ph.D., 2021
After finishing a combined BS/MS program at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research - Mohali, I joined the lab in August of 2016. My MS thesis, under the direction of Dr. Manjari Jain, was on aggressive behavior in male crickets. My Ph.D. research investigated temporal information processing in complex acoustic environments using North American gray treefrogs as a model system.
Currently:
Postdoctoral Associate
University of Washington
Hongyu Li, M.S., 2020
I earned my BS from Sichuan University and joined the lab in August, 2016. My thesis project investigated the role of multi-sensory perception in frogs and how it contributes to sexual communication. To this end, I incorporated robotic models of calling male frogs into field playback experiments to test various hypotheses about how the visual component of an inflating vocal sac influenced female mating decisions in different acoustic contexts.
Currently:
Project Officer
Shenzhen Mangrove Wetlands Conservation Foundation
I worked in both vertebrate and invertebrate systems to answer questions about sexual selection and its consequences for signal evolution. My dissertation focused on how females make mating decisions under conditions of realistic complexity, i.e., when signals are multivariate, environments are noisy, and there exists intra-individual variation in both signaler and receiver behavior. I am also interested in the role of behavioral plasticity in the adaptive differentiation of wild populations.
Currently:
NSF Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Western Australia
I am interested in the mechanisms, evolution, and function of communication and social behaviors. My dissertation took an integrative and comparative approach to understand a common form of social recognition called the “dear enemy effect,” in which territorial individuals learn to recognize and respond less aggressively to familiar territorial neighbors. I also studied two species of rocket frogs (family Aromobatidae) to understand both the ecological and social factors that influence the evolution of neighbor recognition, and the mechanisms that make it possible.
Currently:
Postdoctoral Associate
Cornell University
Robin Suyesh, Ph.D., 2015
I actually earned my Ph.D. from the University of Delhi under the joint supervision of S. D. Biju and Mark Bee. My dissertation focused on acoustic communication in two genera of bush frogs, Raorchestes and Pseudophilautus, in the family Rhacophoridae. Most of my research took place in the Western Ghats. The primary goals of my work were to describe the vocal repertoires of most species in the two genera in India, investigate acoustic niche partitioning in bioacoustic communities of bush frogs, and to investigate the similarity in vocal signals between Indian and Sri Lankan bush frogs.
Currently:
Assistant Professor
Sri Venkateswara College, Delhi University
Katrina Schrode, Ph.D., 2014
I am interested in the neural mechanisms underlying perception and behavior, particularly in the context of animal communication. My dissertation focused on the ability of females of Cope’s gray treefrog, Hyla chrysoscelis, to perform auditory scene analysis. This ability is particularly important for females in finding and selecting high quality mates in loud, dense breeding choruses. Amphibian ears have interesting morphology that suggests perceptual mechanisms that differ from our own. Using behavioral tests, I examined the cues females use to accurately group acoustic signals, and how their unusual ears contribute to exploitation of these cues. I also recorded neural activity in the frog midbrain to identify correlates of the observed behavioral results.
Currently:
Research Manager/Data Analyst
Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science
Beth Pettitt, Ph.D., 2012
My dissertation research investigated the relationship between paternal care and male secondary sex traits used by females in mate choice. I examined the extent to which variation in the acoustic traits of male vocalizations is related to the expression of male paternal efforts and can be exploited by females to predict the quality of paternal care a male will provide. I investigated this relationship in a wild population of Anomaloglossus beebei, a neotropical frog found only in Kaieteur National Park, Guyana, South America.
Currently:
Visiting Assistant Professor
St. Olaf College
My dissertation research investigated the mechanisms by which female frogs exploit spectro-temporal features of background noise to improve their ability to perceive male mating calls amid the cacophony of a chorus environment. Specifically, I examined the characteristics of the background noise of breeding choruses, the extent to which temporally structured masking noises affected signal perception, and the extent to which the properties of conspecific natural background noise affected mating call perception.
Currently:
Assistant Professor
San Francisco State University
Elliot Love, M.S., 2011
My thesis research focused on how males of Cope’s gray treefrogs (Hyla chrysoscelis) dynamically alter their advertisement calls in the noisy and competitive social environments of a breeding lek.
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