Dr. Sheila Kitchen joined the EEB program Fall 2024. She is an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University at Galveston in the Department of Marine Biology. As a trained molecular ecologist, she integrates field, laboratory and computational tools to address fundamental questions surrounding interspecies interactions and their persistence under climate change. Her goal is to transform these results into applied solutions for conservation. Her lab’s research is primarily focused on cnidarian (corals, sea anemones and jellyfish) – algal symbiosis and innate immunity of invertebrates. She is an active member of the Caribbean Coral Restoration Genetics Working Group as part of the Coral Restoration Consortium.
Spotlight: Vivienne Foroughirad
Dr. Vivienne Foroughirad joined the TAMUG Marine Biology Department and EEB program in 2024. Her current research is on the behavioral ecology of cetaceans, focusing on the factors shaping individual behavior and population-level social structures, and how these impact survival and reproduction across the lifespan. Much of her work comes from the long-term Shark Bay Dolphin Project in Australia, where she leverages multi-generational pedigrees of bottlenose dolphins to investigate mechanisms of inheritance of different behavioral phenotypes. She is additionally investigating how such long-lived, slow-reproducing species respond to climate change by examining the impact of marine heatwaves on dolphin behavior and reproduction.
Spotlight: David Bapst
David Bapst, an Assistant Instructional Professor in the Geology & Geophysics department at Texas A&M University, is newly promoted to core faculty membership in the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology program. His research delves into the intersection of phylogenetics and the fossil record, with a particular focus on marine invertebrates and using quantitative paleobiology to uncover macroevolutionary patterns.
David’s passion for paleontology was ignited during his college years when he discovered the power of data analysis in understanding evolution and ecology. “I really enjoyed pulling at the threads of what seems to be a tightly-stitched theory, and using data from the fossil record to answer how evolution works on long time-scales,” he reflects.
David’s favorite aspect of his position, especially in graduate-level EEB elective courses like GEOL 670 and GEOL 651, is fostering analytical thinking in graduate students, and equipping them with statistical and data exploration tools. “The greatest part of my job is teaching others how to think critically about their data and the questions they are trying to answer, and how to pick out methods to move forward,” he says. David appreciates the diverse interests of students who take his courses, from EEB and other affiliated programs, as the diversity of research projects help expose students to explaining their work to very different fields, as well as drawing methodological connections between work even when the questions and data are nothing alike.
Since 2022, David has organized the workshop program for the Open Source for Open Science event run by the EEB program, helping the university community sample the experience of learning R and other languages. Over just the course of a weekend, OSOS organizers and instructors get to see many members of the community develop from not knowing how to program at all, to gaining self-confidence in their own skills. David is also the author of a widely-cited and extensively downloaded R package, paleotree, another way he tries to provide his expertise to the broader community.
Outside academia, David enjoys hiking, board games, roleplaying games, and catching all of the Pokemon.
Spotlight: Shannon Harris
On Saturday July 20th, EEBISO outreach representative Shannon Harris and the Brazos Valley Museum of Natural History paid homage to celebration, childhood wonder, the memory and presence of loved ones, fallen or deployed service members, new beginnings, and more. The Wish Upon a Butterfly festivities began inside the Museum where guests could make a “wish keepsake” and other butterfly crafts while enjoying food, music, and educational booths, before releasing their butterflies outside.
Spotlight: Lee Fitzgerald
The dunes sagebrush lizard has recently been the subject of debate due to its addition to the endangered species list. This small reptile’s habitat in the Permian Basin coincides with some of the most productive oil and gas fields in the nation, leading to a conflict between conservation efforts and industry interests.
In a recent segment on WBUR Boston Public Radio program Here and Now, Peter O’Dowd discussed the complexities of this issue with Texas A&M professor and EEB faculty member Lee Fitzgerald, highlighting the challenges of balancing ecological preservation with economic development.
Photo courtesy of Ryan Hagerty/USFWS from a 5/22/24 article in The Texas Tribune.
