Faculty

I study the links between life history, ecology, quantitative genetics, and behavior. I am particularly interested in how an animal's social environment both provides opportunities and imposes costs, particularly in the context of ecological challenges.

Our research seeks to understand climate change on time-scales from decades to millions of years. We are interested in what forces natural climate variability, how past climates have influenced the ecology and diversity of organisms in the tropics, and how climate change and other human activities will affect the eventual fate of these organisms.

Watershed Biogeochemistry, Aquatic Ecosystem Ecology and Freshwater Science

Our research focuses on biogeochemistry and ecophysiology, with the objective of constraining the mechanisms governing carbon, oxygen and nitrogen cycling, and climate.

Our research focuses on the effects of disturbance on structure and function of populations, communities and ecosystems. Ongoing studies include an analysis of patterns of forest development following cropland abandonment as these are affected by environment, stand history and plant demographic patterns.

Research in the Clark lab focuses on biodiversity and global change, including how species coexist and how they are influenced by changing climate and natural and human disturbance. Studies range in scale from field plots to continental data sets.

We study interactions between nutrition and gut microbial communities in humans.

We investigate the genetic basis of adaptation, including the evolution of phenotypic plasticity and maternal effects, the adaptive value of epigenetic modifications, and other forms of genotype-environment interaction.

Our research focuses on the science and policy of rivers and water in the US. Our work ranges from fluid mechanics and sediment transport to infrastructure finance and federal water policy.

Integrative study of the evolution, function, development, and mechanisms of mammalian social behavior, focused on female-dominant species.

I study how phenotypic traits determine the structure and dynamics of food webs as well as how changes in environmental conditions mediate these processes using a mixture of theory and data.

Our research focuses on characterizing and engineering environmental microbiomes. We apply fundamental concepts from the fields of microbiology, genomics and bioinformatics to environmental engineering applications.

Our research focuses on marine geospatial analysis, ecological applications of geographic information systems and remote sensing; and marine conservation and ecosystem-based management.

I study wetlands, streams and rivers, and how they shape and are shaped by biotic, geophysical, and social processes.

I study microbial community and population responses to anthropogenic environmental alterations including climate change and contaminants.

The Johnson Lab broadly studies the abundance, diversity and activity of marine microbes. We are biological oceanographers, marine molecular ecologists, marine microbiologists and biogeochemists. Our research focuses on the marine cyanobacteria Prochlorococcus, the most abundant phytoplankton in the open oceans.

Inquire about the processes that govern the exchanges of momentum, mass, heat, and energy between the biosphere and the atmosphere. The compass of the research are links between transport phenomenon and biological processes.

My lab is interested in understanding the genetics of how vertebrate species adapt to new environments. We are currently focusing on the threespine stickleback fish as a model for vertebrate adaptation, as well as recently evolved traits in humans that have medical relevance.

Ecological genetics of plant populations

We study responses of the abundances and geographical distributions of species to environmental change, using a demographic approach and focusing on plants, birds, and butterflies.

In the Nowacek lab we study the acoustic ecology of marine megavertebrates, including the ways in which animals use sound to explore their environment as well as the impacts of anthropogenic ocean noise on them.

Our lab studies animal communication and sexual selection from an integrative perspective using a wide range of behavioral ecological, neuroethological, developmental, genetic, and evolutionary modeling techniques. Birds are our most common study subject, but we've also worked with spiders, shrimp, lobsters, insects, lizards, and primates, including humans.

Charles Nunn uses evolutionary approaches to understand and improve human and animal health. He and his research group investigate the ecology and evolution of infectious disease, drivers of variation in sleep, and the links between ecology, evolution and global health.

Plant, soil and atmosphere control on water uptake and transpiration, and exchange for carbon uptake and growth. Specifically, how feedback between plant hydraulics, and soil and atmospheric conditions, and between crown architecture and light distribution affect stomatal conductance and photosynthesis at scales from branches to forest canopies.

From lions to pandas to birds, we study conservation ecology and biodiversity mapping of tropical regions.

I study the effects of human disturbance, such as logging, hunting, and agriculture, on ecological processes and the cascading effects for tropical forest communities.

Our lab studies the genetic changes involved in adaptation and speciation.

Conservation biology, ecology, behavior, and population biology of marine megavertebrates

My current research focuses on plant ecophysiological responses to a changing environment in the context of sustainable agriculture. We investigate how plant metabolism respond to short-term changes in their environment using imaging techniques for dynamic processes.

Quantification of global trends of urbanization and its socio-economic/environmental consequences

Our research interests in applied ecology focus on long-term ecosystem response to large-scale perturbations such as climate change, toxic materials, trace metals, flooding, or nutrient additions.

My research and teaching link soils with ecosystems and the wider environment, most recently Earth scientists’ Critical Zone. He focuses on how humanity is transforming Earth’s soils from natural to human-natural systems, specifically how land-uses alter soil processes and properties on time scales of decades, centuries, and millennia.

I am a chemical ecologist and toxicologist. I work on chemicals that organize marine communities, biofouling, toxicity of fouling management coaitngs and plastics and am beginning to work in restoration ecology

I use observations of natural communities throughout the world as primary inspiration for my study questions. Most generally, my teaching and research efforts are focused on community ecology of salt marshes and rocky shores, conservation of coastal wetlands and reef fish populations, physical-forcing and disease-mediated control of food web dynamics, plant-animal interactions and evolution of fungal farming behavior.

I'm interested in understanding spatial and temporal patterns of human-induced change across Earth's land surface, and especially the effects on natural systems/biodiversity. The tools I use are remote sensing and geospatial analysis.

The Tung lab focuses on the relationship between behavior and genes, including how behaviors shape population genetic structure and the influence of social behavior on gene regulation. We work primarily in nonhuman primates and other social mammals. Our work intersects with UPE through our interests in behavioral ecology, evolutionary ecology, and ecological genetics.

I study the causes of landscape heterogeneity and the consequences of this heterogeneity for populations, communities, and ecosystem processes.

We study the evolutionary genomics of plant-fungal symbiosis and the molecular phylogenetics of fungal diversity.

Research in our lab centers on environmental and evolutionary genomics, primarily in bacteria. Broadly, our group explores mechanisms shaping genetic and functional variation in microbes that play important roles in the natural environment.

We conduct research on questions relating to the evolution of adaptation, reproductive isolation, breeding systems, inbreeding depression, and floral traits in natural plant populations.

We are a research lab at Duke University exploring the causes and consequences of patterns of biological diversity across the planet. We combine observational and experimental approaches with modelling to develop and test hypotheses and build towards synthetic ecological theory.

My work integrates field inventory activities with molecular phylogenetic techniques and geospatial analysis to investigate Madagascar, an area of the world that is biologically complex, poorly understood, and urgently threatened.