Faculty - CIPASS

Ana Carolina Carnaval

About the Lab

This lab studies spatial patterns of biodiversity and their underlying evolutionary and ecological processes, with the explicit aim of improving biodiversity prediction and conservation. Lab projects focus on biogeography, integrative uses of population genetics and population genomics data, GIS-based species distribution models, current environmental data, and paleoclimatic simulations, physiology, and disease ecology. While most past lab projects have focused on tropical regions, particularly the Brazilian Atlantic rainforest, ongoing studies include North American habitats and species. Lab activities may include field, lab, and computational work, and students are encouraged to pursue their interests within a large, collaborative and integrative framework of biodiversity science. Lab projects span a wide range of organisms: from microscopic fungi to plants, invertebrates, and vertebrates small and large.

Yael Wyner

About the Lab

Yael Wyner is currently investigating an innovative approach for bringing up to date scientific research and environmental issues into the ecology classroom through an NSF funded collaboration between City College of New York and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). The project, Ecology Disrupted, uses media produced by the AMNH and published scientific data on every day environmental issues to link the daily lives of students to the ecology of their surroundings. We are field testing the curriculum this year to determine the effectiveness of this type of approach for learning environmental issues, ecological principles, and the nature of scientific activity.

Robert P. Anderson

About the Lab

Our lab conducts biogeographic studies at the interface between ecology and evolution. We study spatial patterns of environmental suitability (e.g., for a particular species) and their ecological and evolutionary consequences. To do so, our research spans levels of biological organization and includes the three interconnected areas: modeling niches & distributions; insular biogeography; and fieldwork, taxonomy & phylogeny. Prof Anderson has used and helped develop methods for modeling species niches and distributions. These techniques are broadly applied in conservation biology, invasive species, zoonotic diseases, and the effects of climate change on biodiversity. Neotropical mammals represent are the lab’s taxonomic and geographic specialty, but Prof Anderson has worked on various other taxa and in several regions.

Karin Block

About the Lab

The Block-Cora lab investigates the role and evolution of minerals in high and low temperature earth systems. She has trained students in a wide array of research topics including investigation of virus-mineral interactions, mining biotechnology, and pollution monitoring in estuarine environments. Her undergraduate students use a wide array of techniques (e.g. field sampling, X-ray diffraction, X-ray fluorescence, electron microscopy, and thermogravimetric analysis) to understand how minerals capture physical, chemical and biological processes in earth systems – including chemical analyses of bivalves for monitoring water quality and environmental changes. Students involved in the IT-ROCS REU program will conduct research to study how climate and land use impacts blue carbon storage and how carbonate mineral chemistry and structure record changes in the environment.

James F. Booth

About the Lab

Prof Booth’s work centers on hazardous weather with projects on: (1) statistical analysis of the hazards; (2) climate model assessment and development related to hazards; and (3) theoretical work on the physics of the storms that create the hazards. work focuses on weather and climate. Currently, the group has active projects focused on storm hazards associated with hurricanes, frontal storms, and atmospheric rivers. The hazards we study are storm surge, wind storms, and inland flooding.

David Lohman

About the Lab

Research in my laboratory focuses on the ecology, evolution, biogeography, and conservation of butterflies and other organisms in Southeast Asia. Current research focuses on several inter-related themes: 1) ButterflyNet: integrating butterfly traits, distributions and phylogenomics; 2) the phylogeography of butterflies and other organisms across the Indo-Australian Archipelago; and 3) the evolution of mimicry in Elymnias (Nymphalidae: Satyrinae) and other butterflies. In terms of number of species, number of individuals, or sheer biomass, insects are the dominant multicellular organisms inhabiting the planet’s terrestrial biomes. Of the 30+ orders of insects, the taxonomy, distribution, and habits of the Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) are perhaps best characterized, making this group well suited to comparative analyses.

Mike Hickerson

About the Lab

Our research seeks to improve ways of using genomic data to reveal the history of, and dispersal between separated populations within any organism. By focusing on multi-species population genetic data, our research seeks to merge population genetics with community ecology and biogeography. We are interested in uncovering processes behind biogeographic shifts, speciation, extinction and determinants of community assembly. We are therefore interested in the processes underlying the distributions and genetic structuring of co-distributed species and populations. Applications also include conservation work that requires identification of regions of bio-climatic stability, persistent connectivity and higher extinction probabilities. Our general direction has been to extend single-species population genetic models into hierarchical multi-species models that can infer the evolutionary and ecological histories of whole assemblages, communities and even ecosystems.

Maria Tzortziou

About the Lab

Research in the Tzortziou Bio-Optics laboratory focuses on assessing impacts of anthropogenic pressures and environmental hazards on inland, coastal, and open ocean biogeochemical cycles, ecological processes, and ecosystem services across temporal and spatial scales. Specific environmental stressors addressed in ongoing projects include urban development, human population shifts, atmospheric pollution, eutrophication, global warming, sea level rise, permafrost thawing, and changing hydrological regimes. Research in the Tzortziou laboratory applies an interdisciplinary framework that integrates enhanced ground-based and satellite remote sensing bio-optical tools with new coupled atmospheric-hydrodynamic-photo-biogeochemical models. Partnering with relevant stakeholders, a key objective of our research is applying results to link science to practice and enhance decision support systems.

Spencer A. Hill

About the Lab

Spencer is a climate scientist in the CCNY Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Department. He is interested in the weather and climate of CCNY’s hometown, New York City, particularly our neighborhood of Harlem, and how extreme weather and climate change impact real-world socioeconomic outcomes, public health measures, and other indicators of the wellbeing of New Yorkers. The tools for addressing this research question include both observational data and climate and weather model simulations.