In the United States, more than half of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students leave their programs before finishing, and only a small portion of those who graduate pursue careers in STEM. The students who leave STEM programs are disproportionately women, persons traditionally excluded because of their ethnicity or race, and non-traditional students. This affects scientific and technological progress not only by limiting the number of skilled candidates, but also in limiting diversity in the workforce. Diversity in teams has many benefits including being better able to solve complex problems. As such, it is essential to assess the issues affecting retention and work toward improvement. Supporting students’ well-being early in college has been shown to increase student success and is particularly important for those who identify as members of groups that have been marginalized in the sciences. With support from The National Science Foundation STEM Education Independent Post-Doctoral Research Program, I will assess whether early intervention programs affect student success by helping support well-being. Specifically, I will (A) develop a peer mentorship program to accompany a first-year seminar, and (B) investigating the impacts of these early intervention programs on student success and well-being with specific focus on comparing traditional to non-traditional students. This project will have immediate impacts on biology students at Northern Illinois University and contribute to establishing and improving first-year seminars and STEM-specific mentorship programs nationwide.

NSF Award #: 2411619

Individuals experience constant fluctuations in social contexts within a breeding season and across their lifetime, and these changes can have a large effect on the expression of behaviors. Behavioral plasticity allows individuals to instantaneously adjust their phenotype to changing contexts, but behaviors are not perfectly plastic. Animal personalities and behavioral syndromes quantify the proportion of behaviors that remain consistent in response to changing cues. My dissertation research used forked fungus beetles (Bolitotherus cornutus) as a system to explore the consistency of and correlations among competition and mating behaviors across contexts. 

See Publications:

Mitchem et al. 2019 

Vilella-Pacheco & Mitchem et al. 2021 

Mitchem et al. 2022 

Green & Mitchem et al. 2025

The function and distribution of animal color patterns is largely determined by responses of other animals to visual cues. These responses can vary based on species-specific visual properties and preferences. As animals can differ in their visual abilities, the evolutionary dynamics of color patterns and visual systems is expected to differ among species. This is further complicated in aquatic habitats, where there is great variation in lighting environments which affects perception of visual cues. The interactions between behavioral response and lighting environment can alter the direction of selection and create drastic differences in color patterns between populations. The challenge is to determine how animals differentially perceive visual cues in their various environments, then relate those visual abilities to preferences and behavioral responses. 

See Publications:

Mitchem et al. 2018 

Mitchem et al. 2019