Past Postdocs

Chhaya Werner

Chhaya was a postdoc in the Shoemaker lab from 2020-2022. She is currently an assistant professor at Southern Oregon University in the Environmental Science, Policy, and Sustainability Department.

Chhaya's postdoctoral work examined how environmental variation and biotic interactions jointly alter patterns of species coexistence and diversity. She developed a sparse modeling approach to handle the high numbers of parameters needed to represent diverse and variable communities. As a USDA-NIFA postdoc fellow, she additionally combined field experiments and theory to study how lagged effects to drought alter species coexistence.​

Nathan Wisnoski

Nathan was a postdoc in the Shoemaker lab from 2020-2022. He was part of the UW EPSCoR Microbial Ecology project, in both the Albeke and Shoemaker labs. Nathan is currently an assistant professor in Biology at Mississippi State University.

As a postdoc in the Shoemaker lab, Nathan quantified the effects of dormancy and dispersal on patterns of species diversity in metacommunities. He additionally examined the generality of scaling patterns of species synchrony and stability across levels of biological organization and spatial scales.
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Past Graduate Students

Catherine Bowler, PhD

Catherine (Cath) completed her PhD in 2022 in the Mayfield community ecology lab at the University of Queensland in Australia. She was co-supervised by Lauren Shoemaker and Christopher Weiss-Lehman.  She completed a Bsc(Hons) at the University of Queensland in 2017. Cath is now a Terrestrial Ecologist at S5 Environmental.

Cath's thesis applied a Bayesian framework to estimate competitive and facilitative species interactions that consider variation arising from demographic stochasticity. Additionally, she investigated how these distributions of species interactions can be used to develop probability distributions of coexistence in natural plant communities. More broadly, she is interested in investigating the importance of non-additive species interactions in plant communities, whilst keeping in mind the logistic challenges of working with parameter heavy models and their potential translation to applied fields such as restoration ecology. 

Past Undergraduate Students and Research Assistants

Annaliese Bronner

Annaliese Bronner graduated from the University of Wyoming in 2021 with a degree in Microbiology. Originally from Colorado Springs, she has always had an interest in science which grew into a passion during her time as a teaching assistant for General Chemistry. Annaliese was a founding member of the lab, working on protist microcosms and grassland ecology projects for three years with the lab
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Andrew Sieben

Andrew was a research assistant in the lab from 2018-2020. Andrew studied the factors that maintain pathogen diversity and the impact public health interventions have on pathogen coexistence. Andrew's work focused on extending modern coexistence theory to pathogen systems and examining the implications of coexistence mechanisms for human health. He is currently in an MD/PhD program at Emory University.  


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