Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
Professor & Heritage Biologist
Retired January 2024
Liz's research interests are in the ecology and conservation biology of land snails, freshwater macroinvertebrates, and algae.
Email: lbergey@ou.edu
Pronouns: He/Him/His
Interim Director & Associate Professor
Eli's area of study is bird behavior and migration, and he often engages in the development of new methods and technologies to do so.
Email: ebridge@ou.edu
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
Heritage Botanist
Amy surveys the state for rare and invasive plants. She conducts floristic inventorys across Oklahoma including Registered Natural Areas, The Nature Conservancy preserves, State Wildlife Management Areas, and National Forests. She is also the Collections Manager in the Bebb Herbarium.
Email: amybuthod@ou.edu
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
Conservation Biologist
Priscilla coordinates the Oklahoma Natural Heritage Inventory and the Oklahoma Natural Areas Registry. She is currently studying native plant restoration and pollinator habitat improvements.
Email: prill@ou.edu
Pronouns: He/Him/His
Heritage Zoologist
Owen is a herpetologist, with a focus on frogs and turtles.
Email: OwenEdwards@ou.edu
Pronouns: He/Him/His
Professor
Bruce's research interests are in plant conservation, biogeography, and vegetation classification.
Email: bhoagland@ou.edu
Pronouns: He/Him/His
Assistant Professor & Heritage Zoologist
James is a community ecologist studying pollinator diversity and conservation, with a focus on bees. He also studies pollination biology and climate change.
Email: KLJHung@ou.edu
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
Associate Professor
Curator, Bebb Herbarium
Abigail studies plant evolution using DNA sequence data, with a focus on how plants adapt to their current habitats and switch between habitats. She is also the herbarium curator and am interested in floristics and taxonomy.
Email: abigail.j.moore@ou.edu
Pronouns: He/Him/His
Associate Professor & Heritage Zoologist
Area of Study: Winter grassland bird movement ecology and conservation. Creating sustainable landscapes. Severe weather ecology
Email: rossjd@ou.edu
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
Associate Professor & Associate Director of the School of Biological Sciences
Lara's main focus of study is understanding how global changes, such as climatic change and invasive species, impact plant biodiversity and carbon dynamics. Locations for her lab's research questions are in temperate prairies, tropical cerrado, and montane meadows.
Email: lara.souza@ou.edu
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
George Lynn Cross Research Professor & Presidential Professor
Caryn's research focuses on the ecology and conservation biology of streams, in particular the functional roles of freshwater mussels, and in quantifying the ecosystem services provided by stream organisms.
Email: cvaughn@ou.edu
Pronouns: He/Him/His
Postdoctoral Researcher
Justin's research focuses on understanding how food and nutrition structure species interactions, especially in the context of plant-pollinator interactions
Email: jbain@ou.edu
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
PI: Eli Bridge
Elizabeth studies the ecology and behavior of Neotropical highland birds using stable isotope analysis and Bayesian statistical methods. She is also a recent David L. Boren Fellow, studying Mandarin in Taipei, Taiwan.
Email: ebesozzi@ou.edu
Pronouns: They/Them/Theirs
PI: Lara Souza
Kieran is investigating the dynamic relationships between prairie plants and their mycorrhizae and microbiomes, especially how those relationships are modified by drought and how those modifications impact plant growth and success.
Email: k.carroll@ou.edu
Pronouns: He/Him/His
PI: Jeremy Ross
Luis is interested in the drivers of bird diversity patterns. He focuses his research on two regions, the tropical Andes and the system: American grassland and the Arctic tundra. He studies the genetic responses to climatic gradients and the phylogeographic path that led birds to their current distributions.
Email: l.cueto@ou.edu
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
PI: Jeff Kelly
Paula studies animal movement in relation to the environment.
Email: paula.m.cimprich-1@ou.edu
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
PI: Lara Souza
Mariela's research focuses on the use of remote sensing and ecological methods to study how drought affects functional groups in a precipitation gradient in a praire.
Email: mariela.encarnacion@ou.edu
Pronouns: He/Him/His
PI: Caryn Vaughn
Alex is interested in the conservation of biological diversity and factors governing the ecology, evolution, and distribution of riverine communities. He uses freshwater mussles as a model to test hypotheses of dispersal and speciation. Specifically, Alex uses innovative genomic and 3D morphometric methods to study diversification and shell morphology evolution to a group of mussels that contain endangered species and cryptic diversity.
Email: ajfranzen@ou.edu
Pronouns: She/They
PI: Bruce Hoagland
Aiyesha's interests are in Applied Geospatial Technologies, Land Change/Land Use, Hydroclimate/Hydrometerologic impacts on vegetation, and Tropical Ecosystems.
Email: aiyesha.ghani@ou.edu
Pronouns: He/Him/His
PI: Eli Bridge
Daniel's research will focus on bird migration patterns using data from a variety of sensors, such as weather radars and moonwatching
Email: dmgomez@ou.edu
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
PI: Abigail Moore
Samantha is an incoming Master's student in Dr. Moore's lab.
Email: samanthah815@ou.edu
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
PI: Jeff Kelly
Christina's research interests include animal behavior, ornithology, sexual selection, and conservation management.
Email: christinak@ou.edu
Pronouns : He/Him/His
PI: James Hung
Sam is an ecologist who enjoys working with plants, pollinators, and interactions between these two fascinating groups! He has worked for a variety of government institutions on the ecology and management of various insect taxa. He recently completed his MSc degree at San Diego Sate University, where he studied seasonal patterns of plant-pollinator interaction networks.
Email: sodell@ou.edu
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
PI: Lara Souza & James Hung
Lauren Rosenfelt is a freelance natural science illustrator and Plant Biology graduate student. She graduated from the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma in 2014 with a BFA and minor in Liberal Arts. Her art and research focuses on sharing the importance of native wildlife and plant species to ecosystem functions.
Email: laurenmrosenfelt@ou.edu
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
PI: Lara Souza
Rust is interested in using belowground systems to measure the effects that invasive species have on grasslands, particularly their efficiency as carbon sinks.
Email: erust@ou.edu
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
PI: Jeff Kelly
Alva studies the effects of climate change on the timing of avian migration. Specifically, she is using North American aerial insectivores as a system to investigate how functional traits shape sensitivity of migration timing to climate change.
Email: alvastrand@ou.edu
Pronouns: He/Him/His
PI: Jeremy Ross
CJ is an incoming Master's student in Dr. Ross's lab
Email: cjstephens@ou.edu
Pronouns: He/Him/His
PI: Alexandra Bentz & Eli Bridge
Hunter is an incoming Master's student in Dr. Bentz's and Dr. Bridge's lab
Email: Hunter.C.Strickland-1@ou.edu
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
PI: Abigail Moore
Marisa's current doctoral work is on the phylogenomics and taxonomy of Heterotheca (Asteraceae: Astereae) while her Masters work is focused on the Euthamia (Asteraceae: Astereae) and broader North American Astereae relationships as a whole.
Email: marisabszubryt@ou.edu
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
PI: Eli Bridge
Abigail studies the subtle effects that heavy metal pollution can have on cognition and other health biomarkers in birds. Her research interests are ecotoxicology, ornithology, and behavioral ecology.
Email: triemstra@ou.edu
Pronouns: He/Him/His
PI: James Hung
Ben is interested in native bee community ecology and conservation biology. His current research focuses on the influence of grazingland management on pollinator diversity.
Email: benturnley@ou.edu
Pronouns: He/Him/His
PI: James Hung
Jackson is interested in insect conservation in general, and is particularly intrigued by ant biogeography and parasites/parasitoids of solitary bees. His research focuses on arthropods of Oklahoma's sand dunes.
Email: jackson.t.wingert-1@ou.edu
Field Biologist
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
PI: James Hung
Izzy is a graduate of Oklahoma State University. At OBS, she surveys bumble bees and native pollinators throughout our state.
Email: isabelle.s.gonzales-1@ou.edu
MS 2024; PI: Abigail Moore
Here is their abstract: The Dryadoideae is a subfamily within Rosaceae (Roses) whose genera primarily live in the western part of North America. It contains Cercocarpus, Chamaebatia, Purshia, and Dryas, and many of which also house nitrogen-fixing bacteria. It is still unknown how exactly the genera in this subfamily are related due to differences in other groups’ analyses. We aim to resolve these relationships using 353 highly conserved regions across the entire genome using the Angiosperm 353 target enrichment sequencing. Morphological variation within Cercocarpus is of particular interest due to the presence of many high-quality leaf fossils. Morphological data extracted from fossil records will help infer relationships within the genus and help time-calibrate the phylogenies generated from target enrichment data, providing a clearer picture into how Dryadoideae have evolved.
Email: leann.e.monaghan-1@ou.edu
MS 2023; PI: Abigail Moore
Teraye studied the comparison of microbiomes of herbarium and silica-dried leaves of Grindelia ciliata.
PhD 2023; PI: Eli Bridge
William studied ecology and conservation of salt marsh birds; wintering ecology of birds; migration ecology; behavioral landscape ecology.
PhD 2023; PI: Jeremy Ross & Eli Bridge
Meelyn studied how noise and climate change affect avian behavior. Currently, Meelyn is working as a Cloud Developer for Cellular Tracking Technologies developing the Terra, a smart-automated recording device to identify bird songs in people's backyards.
MS 2024; PI: Lara Souza
Zoe is researched the role of precipitation gradients on functional diversity of plant communities in temperate grassland.
Email: zwall@ou.edu
