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Maintained by Andrea Lucky Last modified Sunday, November 04, 2007

I am a third year graduate student in the Department of Entomology at the University of California, Davis, and am studying myrmecology under the tutelage of Dr. Philip Ward.  I am interested in studying ants from many different perspectives, including systematics, biogeography, and behavior.  For my doctoral research I am primarily concerned with the systematics of the ant genus Stenamma in Mesoamerica.  Stenamma is a little studied genus of leaf litter ants that is mostly Holarctic in distribution, but is also well represented in Mesoamerican cloud forests.  A better understanding of the diversity and distribution of this genus will aid our understanding of Mesoamerican ant biogeography and ongoing conservation efforts.  I am revising the alpha-level taxonomy of Central American Stenamma, and with molecular methods, producing both a broad-scale phylogeny of the entire genus and a more detailed species-level phylogeny of the Mesoamerican taxa.  As a side project, I am conducting behavioral experiments on Stenamma alas Longino and S. expolitum Smith to better understand the nature of several newly discovered defensive behaviors, which are hypothesized to be adaptations to army-ant predation.  I am also a collaborator on the NSF funded Biodiversity Surveys and Inventories project Leaf Litter Arthropods of Mesoamerica.  Every Spring I will be co-leading a team of undergraduates to a different Mesoamerican country to collect leaf litter arthropods.