Ian Ausprey joined the EEB program in January 2025 and is an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University in the Department of Ecology and Conservation Biology. His research spans community ecology, landscape ecology, functional ecology, population biology, and biodiversity conservation, with a focus on birds as model organisms. He investigates critical topics such as how agricultural and elevational gradients shape tropical bird communities, how urbanization, fragmentation, and wildfire impact avian populations, and how management strategies can promote avian biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. He regularly integrates functional traits and phylogenies to identify mechanistic explanations underlying the sensitivities of species to anthropogenic disturbance and the evolution of biotic communities across space and time.
Spotlight: Lawing Lab
Congrats to EEB scientists Michelle Lawing, Maria Hurtado, Leila Siciliano-Martina and the rest of the Lawing lab for their paleontological work. Their research makes it possible to reconstruct ancient ecosystems by analyzing the teeth of over 50,000 carnivorous animal communities from across the world. “The whole point of our research is to use the fossil record to understand what we see today,” Lawing said. “How has the environment changed, and in turn, how have these communities of animals changed? We are looking for specific traits, such as what a species eats, to identify why populations have declined and communities have changed. We’re modeling the framework for conservation management.” [Photo courtesy of TheBatt.com]
Spotlight: Kristina Chyn
Kristina Chyn is a 3rd year PhD student in Lee Fitzgerald’s lab. Kristina is broadly interested in conservation, landscape ecology, and herpetology.
For her dissertation, she studies the direct and indirect effects of roads on reptiles and amphibians in Taiwan and is conducting her fieldwork on a Fulbright fellowship (2016-2017).
She received her B.S. in Science of Natural and Environmental Systems from Cornell University before joining the EEB program at TAMU.
