The Blumstein Lab (circa 2024-2025)
Dan Blumstein
Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. Between 2009 and 2016 he was the Chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Dan is broadly interested in the evolution of behavior and conservation biology and the integration of behavior into other disciplines. He co-directs the UCLA Evolutionary Medicine Program.
- CV
- complete publication list (with pdf reprints)
email: marmots@ucla.edu
Katie Adler
Katie is a member of Team Marmot who is interested in wildlife conservation and understanding how anthropogenic development impacts marmot demography and fitness.
Learn more: https://www.katieaadler.com/
email: katie.adlerr@gmail.com
Taylor Bastian
Taylor is a member of Team Marmot focusing on understanding environmental effects on social behavior and its fitness consequences in marmots.
email: taylor.n.bastian@gmail.com
Pranav Bellur
Pranav is interested in how feral cats influence avian flight initiation distance.
email: pranav.bellur2001@gmail.com
Jill Carpenter
Jill is a Ph.D. student interested in the roosting and foraging ecology of bats, particularly with regard to how various species navigate and utilize the human-altered landscapes of Southern California.
She’s particularly interested in behavioral responses to anthropogenic noise, light, and other disturbances associated with urban and peri-urban environments. She hopes to combine her robust background in management with the rigor of academia to bridge these disciplines and contribute to evidence-based conservation and management of bats.
email: carpenterj@gmail.com
Katherine Hernandez
Katherine is interested in movement behavior in and across human-altered landscapes. She compliments her ecological research with work in environmental narrative.
email: kathyvictoria@gmail.com
Nurit Katz
Nurit is a PhD student focused on urban biodiversity and nesting raptors in Los Angeles. She is also the Chief Sustainability Officer for UCLA and an Instructor for UCLA Extension.
More detailed bio: https://www.sustain.ucla.edu/contacts/nurit-katz/
email: nkatz@fm.ucla.edu
Eliseo Parra
Eliseo is a Ph. D. student researching fear-and-safety based communication within terrestrial vertebrate communities with varying levels of human-use impact.
Email: parra@neotropicalscience.com
Xochitl Ortiz Ross
Xochitl is a Ph.D. Candidate and a member of Team Marmot studying the fitness consequences of early-life adversity and its role in shaping individuals’ behavior, social network, and life-history strategies.
Email: xortizross@coa.edu
Wilson Sherman
Wilson is interested in the sociocultural factors which shape human-wildlife interaction in shared landscapes and the ecological repercussions of these interactions.
Email: wcs@g.ucla.edu
Xinyu Wang
Xinyu is a Ph.D. student in Landscape Architecture, with a keen interest in assessing the ecological impact of recreation and tourism activities on protected areas, particularly those associated with rivers. Additionally, she is passionate about the fields of natural education and the promotion of ecotourism practices.
Email: wxinyu21@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn
Jimmy Wehsener
Jimmy Wehsener is a Ph.D. student studying the impact of anthropogenic disturbance on animal behavior. He is interested in the fitness consequences of personality variation and using this information to improve conservation of endangered iguanas
Email: jwehsener7@g.ucla.edu
RoboBadger
RoboBadger
When not working, RoboBadger can be found poolside at the Chateau Marmont schmoozing with movie stars.
Popular Press: Science News
email: RoboBadger does not answer email.
Chubs Jr.
Chubs Jr. is a more recent addition to the lab. He used to work with Theo Manno, where he relished scaring squirrels. Now he harasses Two Buck Chuck, a lab mascot.
email: Chubs Jr. does not yet have an email account, but you can email Theo
Alumni (including summer RMBL assistants and interns):
Vanessa Alejandro, Allie Anderson, Aimee Artigues, Lisa Barrow, Sarah Batterman, Samantha Beckert, Elen Blesdoe, Malle Carrasco, Kevin Carter, Lawrance Chung, Jessica Chen, Yvonne Chi, Helen Chmura, Leon Chong, Travis Collier, Louise Cooley, Line Cordes, Ondi Crino, Helene Cristofari, Hannah Cross, Esa Crumb, Agata Czerminska, Carrrie De Jesus, Matt De Jong, Alexis Diaz, Alexis Earl, Megan Edic, Rina Fernandez, Eleonora Ferando, Guadalupe Flores, Eliza Foli, Timothee Fouqueray, Holly Fuong, Susie Garity, Sophie Gilbert, Sarah Gilman, Evan Griffith, Jahaziel Guttierez, Sarah Heissenberger, Alex Hettena, Bill Hintz, Laurie Ikuta, Alexandra Jebb, Gina Johnson, Susan Jojola, Patricia Jones, Seth Kapp, Kristina Kataline, Judith Keenen, Carolyn Kelly, Svenja Kroeger, Amanda Lea, Casey Lee, Olivia LeDee, Chunwang Li, Louise Lochhead, Jorge Lopez, Dave Loyst, Mark Luterra, Soyeon Im, RAchel Mady, Adriana Maldonado-Chaparro, Terry Maul, Doug McClain, Dakota McCoy, Sarah McNichols, Anita Montero, Lucas Moyer-Horner, Olivier Munos, Nicole Munoz, Austin Nash, Julia Nelson, Amanda Nicodemus, Gustavo Alacon Nieto, Chiron Otero, Julia Otero, Benison Pang, Elizabeth Palmer, David Pelletier, Kathleen Peshek, Richard Pickins, Findley Ransler, Charlotte Récapet, Andrew Reese, Elizabeth Rhoades, Christian Robstad, Xochitl Ortiz Ross, Jeffrey Roth, Geoffroy Saint Aime, Mona Seymour, Maria Shafer, Erin Shelley, Vivien Shen, Aditya Singh, Tamara Snyder, Jennifer Sojka, Ana Solis, Madi Standen, Tricia Stark, Karissa Tang, Elisa Tarlow, Winnie Tran, Adrienne Turner, Ryan Trojan, Jazmine Uy, Emery Valencia, Tyler Van Fleet, Laure Verneyre, Nitin Vincent, Irene Völlmy, Erin Voss, Kelly Walters, Jessica Whittaker, Dana Williams, Jamie Winternitz, Kwasi Wrensford, Catherine Wu, Wei Jenny Yang, Veronica Yovovich, Xinping Zhang, Claire Zugmeyer.
Eric Abelson
Eric Abelson was a UCLA La Kretz Center for California Conservation Science Postdoc working with Dan and Seth Riley from the National Park Service. His work sits at the intersection of mammalian conservation biology and wildlife behavior. His recent work has examined the interaction between behavior and extinction risk as well as behavioral impacts of monitoring on capture rates. His postdoctoral research focused on wildlife behavior at roadsides with an eye toward reducing wildlife-vehicle collisions.
He is now a researcher at the University of Texas, Austin.
email: abelson@alumni.stanford.edu
Madelin Andrade
Madelin Andrade is a Master’s student studying avian anti-predator behavior along elevational and latitudinal gradients.
email: msandrade@ucla.edu
Tiffany Armenta
Tiffany received her Ph.D. in 2017 and was co-advised by Dan and Bob Wayne. A member of Team Marmot, she used gene expression studies to determine the immunological impact of stress in wild populations.
She is now a Biologist at the US Army Corps of Engineers.
email: tiffany.armenta@gmail.com
Oded Berger-Tal
Oded Berger-Tal was a Rothschild and Fulbright postdoctoral fellow at UCLA and the San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research. His main interest is the integration of behavioral ecology into conservation and management. In his doctoral research he investigated the behavioral response of animals (in particular, animals that have been reintroduced to nature) to novel environments. For his postdoctoral research he investigated ways to encourage natural foraging behaviors in reintroduced California condors.
He is now a faculty member at the Mitrani Department of Desert Ecology and the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
email: oded.berger.tal@gmail.com
Rachel Blakey
Rachel is a La Kretz Center for California Conservation Science Postdoctoral Fellow working with Dan and Seth Riley on the effects of fire on mountain lions in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. Rachel’s past research has focussed on how disturbance patterns influence the movement, food webs and community assembly of highly mobile predators (bats, owls, raptors) in regions prone to fire and drought. After completing her PhD at University of New South Wales, Australia, she has worked with University of Idaho, University of Missouri and The Institute for Bird Populations.
email: rachelvblakey@gmail.com
Dan Cooper
Dan Cooper analyzed geographic associations of breeding birds and plants in the eastern Los Angeles Basin for his Master’s (UC Riverside), and has returned to complete a PhD studying the success of wildlife, particularly birds, in adapting to urbanization and novel habitats. He was co-advised by Pam Yeh.
He’s the founder of Cooper Ecological Consulting.
email: dan@cooperecological.com
Janice Daniel
Janice Daniel was a senior research associate who managed the marmot database, worked on team marmot, helped develop JWatcher, and co-authored the JWatcher book. She now is the program manager the UCLA Cal-Teach Program.
email: janice@ucla.edu
Prof. Mario Diaz
Mario is a Professor in the Spanish Research Council, and is currently a Fulbright visiting scholar to the lab. His main interests are in large-scale geographical and temporal patterns on the effects of urbanization on bird behavior and its ecological causes (and social consequences). General interests are in long-term sustainability of human-made systems, including cities, agricultural landscapes, and managed forests.
More info in https://scholar.google.es/citations?sortby=pubdate&hl=es&user=Yrmj5asAAAAJ&view_op=list_works
Email: mario.diaz@mncn.csic.es
email: rachelvblakey@gmail.com
Megan Edic
Megan is an M.S. student and a member of Team Marmot investigating the variation of female dispersal.
email: meganedic16@gmail.com
Nannan Gao
Nannan is a postdoctoral fellow developing an international database of urban diversity and research on precise relationships between city size and global biodiversity drivers. She received her Ph.D. in 2018 at Peking University and has continued to work there.
email: gaonannan@pku.edu.cn
Watcharapong Hongjamrassilp
Watcharapong Hongjamrassilp (aka Win) is a PhD student supported by a fellowship from the Government of Thailand (Development and Promotion of Science and Technology) with broad interests in biology, including the evolution of behavior and morphology, behavioral ecology, and their applications (e.g., to conservation and ecotourism). He received his MS in Marine Biology from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD in 2016. His dissertation work will study the mystery of the semiaquatic mass migration of freshwater shrimp in Thailand and the effects of ecotourism on shrimp migration.
email: winbiologist@g.ucla.edu
Lilah Hubbard
Lilah Hubbard was a UCLA graduate who was a research assistant and collaborator on Team Marmot.
email: lilahhubb@ucla.edu
Gina Johnson
Gina was a M.S. student and member of Team Marmot looking at the relationship between the gut microbiome and fitness traits.
email: ginajohnson@ucla.edu
Alex Kirschel
Alex Kirschel received his Ph.D. in 2008. He was co-advised by Charles Taylor. His dissertation focused on causes and consequences of environmental acoustics on birdsong. He also worked on a project developing acoustic sensor arrays to census avian biodiversity and study behavioral interactions remotely.
He’s currently on the faculty at the University of Cyprus.
Amanda Lea
Amanda Lea was an award-winning honors student and then became a research assistant and collaborator on Team Marmot. She has studied the quantitative genetics of various marmot traits along with questions about both communication networks and the development of antipredator behavior. Recently she’s been working on quantifying MHC variation in marmots.
She was a NSF Graduate Fellow and received her PhD working with Susan Alberts and Jenny Tung at Duke and is now an Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt.
email: amandalea7180@gmail.com
Adriana Maldonado-Chaparro
Adriana Maldonado-Chaparro received her Ph.D. in 2015. She was a Fullbright Doctoral Fellow from Colombia. Her Masters work focused on capybara population biology and behavior, and her dissertation she studied the consequences of phenotypic plasticity for marmot population dynamics. Side projects explored the consequences of marmot social relationships.
She was a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology at Konstanz, Germany and is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Rosario in Bogotá, Colombia.
email: maldonado.aa@gmail.com
Julien Martin
Julien Martin was a FQRNT Postdoctoral Fellow from Quebec who went onto a Marie Curie Fellowship and then Lectureship at the University of Aberdeen. As a doctoral student he’s collaborated with us on studies of heritability of a variety of traits (in addition to doing is own dissertation work on reproductive strategies of ungulates). For his postdoctoral research he studied evolutionary dynamics and selection in marmots.
He is now an Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa.
email: julien.martin@uottawa.ca
https://juliengamartin.github.io/
Ryan Martinson
Ryan is studying sociality and longevity in humans.
email: ryanmartinson@ucla.edu
Peter Mikula
Peter Mikula is a postdoctoral fellow at Institute of Vertebrate Biology, Czech Republic, currently visiting lab as a Fulbright visiting scholar. He is mainly interested in bird behavior from macroevolutionary and macroecological perspective, urban ecology and biodiversity, conservation culturomics and iEcology.
More information: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Peter-Mikula-2.
Email: petomikula158@gmail.com
Alyssa Morgan
Alyssa Morgan was a Master’s student and member of Team Marmot. She studied the effect of human impacts on marmot behavior and population biology.
email: amorgan@poets.whittier.edu
Raquel Monclús
Raquel Monclús was a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow from Spain and is now a lecturer at the University of Madrid. Her doctoral thesis dealt with behavioral and physiological responses of European rabbits to predators. She studied the fitness consequences of antipredator behavior, and a number of questions about maternal effects in yellow-bellied marmots.
She is an Associate Professor at the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord
email: raquel.monclus@uam.es
http://www.behavecol.es/en/people/raquel-monclus~5
Nicole Munoz
Nicole Munoz received her Ph.D. in 2015. She was an NSF Fellow who studied the conditions under which animals should integrate stimuli from different modalities. She evaluated key predictions of her model by studying yellow-bellied marmot risk assessment.
She now lives in Boulder, Colorado.
email: nemunoz@ucla.edu
Chase Niesner
Chase studies multi-species communication and is currently looking at the evolutionary history of "mobbing behavior" in birds. At the IoES he combines ecology and multi-species ethnography, and is a working member of the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS).
email: chasealexander1@gmail.com
Chloe Nouzille
Chloe received her M.S. working with Dr. Blumstein and Dr. Seth Riley in conjunction with the National Park Service. She studied
post-Woolsey Fire recovery of wildlife and recolonization in the Simi Hills and Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.
email: cmnouzille@gmail.com
Lucretia Olson
Lucretia Olson received her Ph.D. in 2009 studying the evolution and maintenance of male coalitionary behavior and male marmot reproductive strategies.
She is a researcher at the US Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missolua, Montana.
email: lucretia@ucla.edu
Megan Owen
Megan Owen received her PhD in 2014. Her dissertation focused on giant pandas behavior.
She is the Corporate Director of Wildlife Conservation Science, Endowed Benirschke Chair at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance
email: mowen@sandiegozoo.org
Matt Petelle
Matt Petelle received his PhD in 2014. His dissertation focused on explaining personality variation in marmots.
He is currently a research scientist at the San Diego Zoo Conservation Alliance.
email: matthew.petelle@gmail.com
Conner Philson
Conner is Ph.D. student and a member of Team Marmot using social networks to study the social group characteristics that influence marmot fitness and life history
email: cphilson@g.ucla.edu
Gabriela Pinho
Co-advised by Dan and Bob Wayne Gabi was a member of Team Marmot taking leadership of the marmot genome project and focusing on epigenetics.
email: gabriela.m.pinho@gmail.com
Kim Pollard
Kim Pollard received her Ph.D. in 2009 studying causes and consequences of sociality. Empirical work focused on the evolution of individually specific alarm calls in sciurid rodents.
She is a researcher at the US Army Research Laboratory in Maryland studying acoustic attributes that affect human communciation.
email: kpollard@ucla.edu
http://www.kimberlypollard.com/
Bree Putman
Working with Dan Blumstein and Greg Pauly of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. She studied the evolution of antipredator behavior and how fear responses can inform us on how animals might respond to novel human-induced threats such as urbanization. She previously studied the predator-prey relationship between California ground squirrels and rattlesnakes. Her postdoc research quantified reptile responses to urbanization in Southern California and determine which biological traits associate with different lizard species’ sensitivities (e.g., being urban-tolerant vs. urban-intolerant).
She is now an Assistant Professor at California State University San Bernadino.
email: putman.bree@gmail.com
Max Ringler
Max is investigating the apparent paradox of (missing) amphibian social organization – while some form of social organization occurs in fish, reptiles, birds and mammals, virtually nothing has been described in amphibians so far, although amphibians feature many building blocks of social cognition. His study species is the “non-poisonous poison frog” Allobates femoralis, which he and his wife Eva are following in natural, and semi-natural, controlled populations in French Guiana, as well as in captivity at home in Vienna. His research at UCLA mainly focuses on call characteristics, calling activity and group communication in collaboration with Dan, Peter Narins, and Charles Taylor.
email: max.ringler@univie.ac.at
Mackenzie Scurka
Mackenzie was a M.S. student and member of Team Marmot who studied the heritability of behavioral traits in wild marmot populations.
Email: scurkamackenzie@gmail.com
Zachary Schakner
Zachary Schakner was an NSF Fellow and received his Ph.D. in 2016 studying wildlife-human conflict. Empirical work focused on California Sea Lions and he evaluated fear conditioning techniques to reduce negative interactions with the sport-fishing industry.
He now works for NOAA Fisheries.
email: zschakner@ucla.edu
Brian Smith
Brian Smith received his Ph.D. in 2008 studying the fitness consequences of individuality in animals. Empirical work focused on behavioral syndromes in guppies.
He now lives in the Baltimore area where he works for the state goverment.
email: smithbr@ucla.edu
Jennifer Smith
Jennifer Smith was a Center for Society and Genetics Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA and is now an Associate Professor at Mills College. Her marmot work studies the influences of maternal effects on the condition, behavior and fitness of marmots.
She is an Associate Professor at Mills College.
email: smith.jennifer.elaine@gmail.com
http://www.jenniferelainesmith.com/
Ana Solis
Ana is a UCLA graduate who is a research assistant and collaborator on Team Marmot.
email: anasolis22@ucla.edu
Kenta Uchida
Kenta is a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Fellow and member of Team Marmot studying mechanisms underlying human impacts on wildlife. In particular, he is interested in effect of habituation to humans on antipredator behaviors and survival.
email: k.uchida@ees.hokudai.ac.jp
Maddy Uetrecht
Maddy is a M.S. student studying the impacts of human recreation and ecotourism on wildlife.
email: mruetrecht@gmail.com
Tina Wey
Tina Wey received her Ph.D. in 2011. A member of Team Marmot, she pioneered the use of social network statistics to study marmot sociality.
She is a researcher in Montreal.
email: tina.wey@gmail.com
https://sites.google.com/site/tinawey/
Dana Williams
Dana is a Ph.D. student, a member of Team Marmot, and studies innovation, learning, and social transmission in yellow-bellied marmots.
email: dmwilliams@ucla.edu
Lijie Yin
Lijie Yin is a visiting scholar from Peking University. Lijie is interested in behavioral ecology and conservation biology and has spent the past 15 years studying white-headed leaf monkeys in China. While in the US, she will join Team Marmot and discover the wonders of terrestrial ground squirrels.
email: ljyin@pku.edu.cn
Veronica
And, if you become a mamoteer, look what you have to look forward to. Here‘s Veronica in a (ahem) more recent job studying wolves and what they eat...yes, she’s in the elk! Following this episode, she received a Ph.D. at the University of California Santa Cruz studying mountain lions.