The lab is incredibly excited to welcome Mary Burak! Mary is joining the lab as a Fulbright Scholar based in Kenya followed by an IBES Voss Postdoctoral Fellowship. Together these prestigious awards will support Mary for three years both in Kenya and at Brown. Mary will collaborate with a number of major NGOs as well as scholars at the University of Nairobi, the National Museums of Kenya, and Mpala Research Centre to address critical data needs for the conservation of large carnivores and herbivores across Kenya. 

Mary completed a PhD in Os Schmitz's lab at Yale University in 2023. She is a star and we are so keen to learn from her and collaborate with her over the next few years and beyond!

Congratulations to Robert Ang'ila for publishing a paper based on his Masters research in African Journal of Ecology! Robert's paper reports on spatial associations between the abundance and diversity of wildlife and understory plant communities across the massive CTFS-ForestGEO plot at Mpala Research Centre in Kenya. The work highlights how fine-scale variation in soil and topography can shape plant-herbivore interaction networks that play out over much broader scales. Great work, Robert!

A million congrats to Bianca Brown on her latest publication, which now appears typeset and formatted in Molecular Ecology! Bianca's insight, creativity, and leadership are on full display in this masterpiece of a paper that investigates patterns of phylosymbiosis in the small mammal community at Mpala Research Centre. Bianca highlights the importance of phylogenetic scale in investigations of phylosymbiosis and underscores the value of studies that investigate how local ecological context can modify our 'global' expectations about host-microbiome associations. Way to go, Bianca!

Brown BRP, Goheen JR, Newsome SD, Pringle RM, Palmer TM, Khasoha LM, Kartzinel TR. 2023. Host phylogeny and functional traits differentiate gut microbiomes in a diverse natural community of small mammals. Molecular Ecology doi: 10.1111/mec.16874