Current lab members
Erin Mordecai
Erin Mordecai is an assistant professor in Biology. She obtained her PhD in 2012 from UC Santa Barbara with Jonathan Levine and Kevin Lafferty. She completed an NSF Mathematical Biology postdoc at UNC Chapel Hill and NC State University with Charles Mitchell and Kevin Gross. She studies the ecology of infectious diseases in plants, animals, and humans.
NICOLE NOVA
Nicole is a Biology PhD student (Eco/Evo) in the Mordecai and Petrov Labs (2016-now). She received her undergraduate and graduate training in dental surgery at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. She also studied electrical engineering for a year at the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. She then spent a year at Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center working on mathematical modeling of cancer evolution in the Michor Lab. Then, she worked on eco-evolutionary dynamics of infectious disease (i.e., within-host modeling of HIV and antibody co-evolution) in the Koelle Research Group at Duke. Nicole is interested in the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases in wildlife, rapid adaptation, population genetics, conservation genomics, and large carnivore conservation.
Lawrence UricChio
Lawrence is an NIH IRACDA postdoctoral fellow. He earned his PhD in bioinformatics from UCSF in 2014. He studies competitive processes within and between species using both mathematical models and empirical data, and is interested in how evolutionary forces shape genetic and phenotypic diversity. In the Mordecai lab, Lawrence works on model-based parameter inference in a system of competing native and invasive plant species in Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. Lawrence is jointly mentored by Noah Rosenberg and Erin Mordecai.
SONGHEE HAN
Songhee is an undergraduate research assistant studying earth systems at Stanford. Interested in epidemiology, spatial analysis, and science education, she is learning how humans and their surroundings can work together to sustain a healthy relationship.
MARTA SHOCKET
Marta joined the Mordecai Lab as a postdoc in 2016 after completing her PhD at Indiana University with Spencer Hall. She’s primarily interested in the seasonality and environmental regulation of infectious diseases. Other interests include eco-evolutionary dynamics of host resistance, how within-host processes scale up to patterns at the population level, and community ecology approaches to disease. In the Mordecai lab, Marta studies how temperature impacts the transmission of mosquito- and fly-vectored diseases. Her PhD work investigated how temperature and food resources influence a freshwater zooplankton-fungus disease system using field observations, experiments, and mathematical models.
MEGHAN HOWARD
Meghan joined the Mordecai Lab as an Eco/Evo PhD student in September of 2016. She earned her undergraduate degree in Anthropology at UNC-Chapel Hill, and later completed postbaccalaureate coursework in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at North Carolina State University (NCSU). She has worked as a research technician for the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences’ Ornithology Unit, the Reiskind Vector Ecology Lab at NCSU, and the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center’s Neighborhood Nestwatch Program. Meghan’s research interests include impacts of land use change on the ecology of vector-borne disease, coevolution in disease systems, and eco-evolutionary dynamics of host defense strategies. She’s most excited by opportunities to explore these topics in a way that inform conservation and public health programs.
Johannah Farner
Johannah Farner is an undergraduate majoring in biology. She joined the lab in 2015.
ANDY MACDONALD
Andy MacDonald is a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Biology and Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation Science Postdoctoral Fellow. He completed his PhD in ecology, evolution and marine biology in 2016 at UC Santa Barbara with Cherie Briggs. His interests are in vector-borne disease ecology and environmental change. He studies tick-borne disease systems in North America and mosquito-borne disease in Latin America.
Jamie CaldwelL
Jamie is a postdoctoral fellow investigating climate drivers of mosquito-borne diseases with Erin Mordecai (Biology), Desiree LaBeaud (School of Medicine) and Eric Lambin (Woods Institute for the Environment). Jamie is interested in the ecology and spatial dynamics of infectious diseases in humans and marine and terrestrial wildlife. A major component of her postdoctoral research is to develop climate-driven predictive models of Dengue and Chikungunya in Kenya and Ecuador. She received her PhD in 2017 from the University Hawai‘i at Mānoa in zoology and marine biology where she studied infectious disease dynamics in coral reefs. She continues to study coral diseases as part of a NASA Ecological Forecasting project with the University of Hawai‘i, James Cook University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
TYLOR JILK
Tylor is a sophomore planning to major in physics as well as pursue the pre-
medicine track. From Wisconsin, he has always been interested in biology and the STEM field. In his free time, he runs with Stanford Running Club and builds rockets with Stanford Space Initiative.
tjilk@stanford.edu
alumni lab members
Teri Barry
Teri is our plant communities pathogen project field and lab manager. She earned her MS is Biology/Ecology at San Jose State University, and has since worked on research for a paper (Burge et. al., 2016) on the California Floristic Province at California Academy of Sciences, and the Global Change Experiment in the Field lab at Carnegie. Teri is interested in the drivers of geographic distribution of plants. She strives to support conservation through understanding how variables such as pathogens and invasive species drive plant distribution and community composition.
CAROLINE DAWS
Caroline is our lab technician. She recently finished her BS in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is interested in how plant-fungal interactions drive ecosystem function.
ELIZABETH WALLACE
Elizabeth is a Sophomore trying to combine her love of the environment and the humanities. She hopes to learn more about the conservation implications surrounding the research done at the Mordecai Lab. In her free time you might find her walking backwards around campus as a Tour Guide or knee deep in compost at the Escondido Elementary edible garden.
DIVYA RAMANI
Divya is an undergraduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is majoring in the Biological Sciences and plans to pursue a career in health care. She is interested in research related to human health and the society humans live in, as well as the effects of the environment on the welfare of living things.
Visit Divya's LinkedIn profile.
ELIZABETH WALLACE
Elizabeth is a Sophomore trying to combine her love of the environment and the humanities. She hopes to learn more about the conservation implications surrounding the research done at the Mordecai Lab. In her free time you might find her walking backwards around campus as a Tour Guide or knee deep in compost at the Escondido Elementary edible garden.
Ryan Tabibi
Ryan is currently a junior in high school attending a boarding school on the east coast. He exhibits a clear passion for his studies, involving himself in several rigorous science classes. Ryan hopes to pursue chemistry and biology, eventually applying his knowledge to biochemistry or chemical engineering in college.