People

Lauren Shoemaker

Lauren joined the Botany Department at the University of Wyoming as an assistant professor in 2019. She is also faculty in the Program in Ecology (PiE). Before moving the the University of Wyoming, she was a James S. McDonnell Postdoc Fellow in Complex Systems Science, which has greatly influenced her approach to ecological research. Lauren is passionate about combining ecology, math, and complex systems science to answer pressing questions in population and community ecology. Lauren joined the editorial board at Ecology Letters in 2018.

She received her BA in biology and mathematics from Colorado College and her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Colorado along with a certificate in Interdisciplinary Quantitative Biology. She completed a postdoc in the University of Minnesota's Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior department before joining UW.

My Google Scholar Page

Postdocs

Melissa DeSiervo

Melissa joined the Shoemaker lab in August 2020 as a postdoc in quantitative community ecology. Her research interests are centered around theoretically motivated questions such as: Why do some populations vary greatly in space and time while others are relatively stable? How does dispersal among patches with variable resource quality influence local population and community dynamics? Melissa received her PhD from Dartmouth college in July 2020 where her dissertation research was centered around the population dynamics of an abundant Arctic mosquito species (Aedes nigripes). Prior to her PhD, Melissa obtained an MSc from Humboldt State University studying patterns of understory plant community assemblage after wildfire across a serpentine soil productivity gradient. As a postdoc in the Shoemaker lab, Melissa builds on metacommunity modelling approaches to explore the role of species’ dispersal strategies on community assemblage and coexistence. She also develops new theory and mathematical approaches related to the intersection of disturbance and nutrient influx on herbaceous plant community dynamics as part of the DRAGnet global research network.

Email: mdesierv(at)uwyo.edu

Dusty Gannon

Dusty joined the lab in 2022 as part of the EPSCoR Modelscapes project. He completed a PhD in ecology and MSc in statistics from Oregon State University in 2022, during which he focused on patterns of pollinator movement and how they translate to plant population connectivity. More generally, he is interested in the assembly, maintenance, and evolution of ecological communities and the use of quantitative techniques, both theoretical and empirical, to gain a better understanding of complex systems and fundamental questions in ecology. As a part of the Modelscapes project, Dusty will be working on combining time-series analysis with sparse modeling approaches to leverage long-term datasets in an effort to parse out key biological interactions in speciose communities. He is additionally interested in developing models to understand how adaptive foraging of a pollinator community may interact with plant community synchrony and whether adaptive foraging can act as a stabilizing mechanism for plant communities.

Email: dgannon(at)uwyo.edu

Graduate Students

Janette Davidson

Janette is a PhD student in the Program in Ecology with broad interests in community ecology, environmental change, and computational biology. She is currently studying the dynamics of community synchrony using models and microcosms, and is interested in how invasion events affect and alter synchrony. She completed her BA in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado: Boulder in 2017, where she previously researched drivers of seed dispersal, phenotypic plasticity, and spatial coexistence. She is also interested in science communication, particularly through art, and has collaborated with the Biodiversity Institute at the University of Wyoming to share graphics on conservation research.

Email: jdavid21(at)uwyo.edu

Kaitlyn McKnight

Kaitlyn started her Ph.D. in fall 2020 and her research is centered around theoretical community ecology. She is broadly interested in how species fluctuate through space and time and what drives community composition. She has specific interests in spatiotemporal synchrony and stability in systems experiencing environmental change. Goals for her research include decomposing the roles of environment, species interactions, synchrony, and evenness in driving overall ecosystem stability.

Email: kmcknig2(at)uwyo.edu
Twitter: (at)kait_mckUW

Megan Szojka

Megan joined the lab in 2020 as a community ecologist studying how mechanisms of species coexistence shift in the context of climate change. For her PhD work she is interested in how dispersal and species interactions are altered along a temperature gradient, with implications for predicting biodiversity change. Her MSc thesis focused on uncovering the role of transient species on stable community dynamics – work that she intends to expand upon as changing conditions create a mismatch between resident communities and suitable habitat. Through her research Megan seeks to build on existing ecological frameworks with the aim of bridging theory to applied management across systems.

Email: mszojka(at)uwyo.edu

Undergraduate Research Assistants

Emilie Craig

Emilie Craig is a junior studying Environmental Sciences and Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Originally from Maine, she has always had an interest in ecology which grew into a passion during her time surveying the health of coral reef ecosystems in Beqa, Fiji. Her work and studies focus specifically on how plant and animal species adapt to changing environmental conditions. She is currently a field technician at Niwot Ridge, working with Dr. Shoemaker and Megan Szojka to transplant flower species from subalpine to alpine environments in attempt to monitor climate adaptation. While she is unsure what she would like to do after graduating, future career goals include continued ecology research, environmental justice, and spending as much time outdoors as possible.

Katie Peel

Katherine (Katie) Peel is a senior at the University of Wyoming attaining a B.S. in Biology with a concentration in Evolution and Ecology, with an interest in botany. She is currently working as a research assistant for EPSCoR on a Disturbance and Resources Across Global Grasslands (DRAGnet) project with Dr. Shoemaker and Melissa DeSiervo. Some of the main focuses are observing the changes in species diversity in seed rain spatial dispersal and seed bank temporal dispersal from seed traps and soil cores from fertilized, disturbed, and control plots from the local UWYO SAREC site. She is also working part-time at the Rocky Mountain Herbarium as an assistant to the curators to expand her botanical knowledge on the region's biodiversity and evolutionary history. After graduation plans include an entry-level position to continue to enhance lab and field-work skills.

Lauren Regnell

Lauren Regnell is a senior studying Zoology and Music Performance for Clarinet. Originally from southeastern PA, she grew up surrounded by nature and wanted to pursue a study in the life sciences. Upon graduation, she hopes to continue her education either at graduate school or to apply to veterinary school. Lauren works in the lab by assisting in several projects, specifically the experiments regarding community synchrony. This work involves creating communities of species of protists and invading them with other protists to test their resistance and resilience. Outside of work, Lauren’s passions lie in music, where she performs in multiple University ensembles, including the Western Thunder Marching Band.