I plan to take new graduate students in the spring or fall 2025.

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I plan to take new honours students for the fall 2025. If you are interested in honours projects, please click here.

Please note: I am currently unable to take on international students unless they have fellowship support already in place.

Graduate work in our lab is intense – we seek extremely motivated students who have demonstrated an ability to take projects from beginning to end and who have a passion for understanding nature.

Students who are interested in pursuing graduate studies should email me with a resume or cv, a brief description of their graduate project interests, and a university transcript (unofficial is fine). Please note that I am sometimes slow to respond to emails, particularly during peak teaching times.

Here are a few potential graduate projects that we hope to pursue:

(1) Does adaptation to the cold compromise competitive ability in Nicrophorus carrion beetles?
Based on Jill Wettlaufer's graduate work, we now know that the early season specialist, N. sayi, can stay active at cold temperatures, even at temperatures below freezing. Later in the spring, however, N. sayi loses most carcasses (their key resource for reproduction) to N. orbicollis. Size determines who wins aggressive contests for carrion, but N. orbicollis is not much larger, on average, than N. sayi. Instead, N. orbicollis is much more abundant, and thus the largest individual coming to claim a carcass later in the season is more likely to be N. orbicollis. Does cold tolerance compromise abundance in N. sayi, and if yes, how?

(2) Reinforcement, sexual selection, and the evolution of diverse ornamentation in birds
Pairing or hybridizing with the wrong species can be costly. These costs can favour the evolution of divergent signals (reinforcement) that help individuals to mate within the same species. In species with strong sexual selection (e.g., hummingbirds, birds-of-paradise), we might expect reinforcement to interact with sexual selection to influence the diversification of signals and ornaments. This project would test this idea across multiple bird families with strong sexual selection.

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​(3) Key adaptations and primary challenges for marsh-breeding Nicrophorus beetles

Challenging or extreme environments typically require key adaptations that allow some organisms to persist. Identifying the primary challenges of extreme environments is important to link adaptations with selective pressures. Wetlands present a major challenge for breeding burying beetles that typically bury small vertebrate carcasses in soil or under vegetation for breeding. The key challenge of wetlands appears to be water, but how and why water constrains beetles is poorly understood. This study will examine reproductive success of Nicrophorus in different marshes, identifying rates of failure and their causes across the breeding season. The work will test the hypothesis that periodic flooding is a major selective pressure acting on marsh-breeding Nicrophorus, and that competition for carcasses (with other insects in particular) intensifies with season and ambient temperature. The project will require measures of water level variation over time in each marsh, along with precipitation and temperature measurements.

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(4) Climate and the distributional limits of migratory birds

Migration is thought to be a central strategy to avoid the challenges of harsh climates; however, we don't fully understand how often migratory birds track climate throughout the annual cycle and how the climatic limits on their distributions change through time. This project would use large community science (eBird) data on the temporal and spatial distributions and relative abundance of migratory birds to test hypotheses that: (i) climatic limits correspond to the spatial and temporal edges of their ranges, (ii) birds track climate through the annual cycle, (iii) spatial climatic and temporal climatic limits are concordant, and (iv) species show consistent variation in patterns of climatic limits around the world (with latitude, geography).