Cathy Collins, Associate Professor of Biology (Website). How do anthropogenic changes such as nutrient deposition and fragmentation interfere with species interactions essential for maintaining biodiversity? How can we use this information to restore diversity and function to plant communities in degraded habitats? These general questions drive much of the work in Professor Collins’ lab. Most recently, her work has focused on the impact of landscape fragmentation and climate change on seed pathogens and their plant hosts, to better understand if, and how, disrupting plant-fungal interactions will impact plant diversity. While Dr. Collins typically focuses on plants as a field “system”, she has addressed fundamental ecological questions with fungi, birds, insects, and mammals.
Rebecca Cox, Assistant Professor of Biology. Dr. Rebecca Cox received her PhD from Weill Cornell Medicine in 2019, before completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan. She studies the mechanism governing co-regulation of the retromer complex, which is implicated in the development of Alzheimer’s disease.
Ellie Diamant, Assistant Professor of Biology. Dr. Ellie Diamant is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist interested in how organisms and populations respond to rapid human-caused environmental change, and how human and non-human organisms and systems relate to and affect each other. Diamant loves working with students, in the classroom or through mentorship, and opening up avenues where they can discover their passions (or at least become scientifically literate!).
Emily Hager, Assistant Professor of Biology. Dr. Hager is a biologist interested in how large-scale behaviors and patterns are built up from interactions among individual cells and organisms, and the role of the environment in shaping those interactions over mechanistic and evolutionary time scales.She is currently a postdoctoral fellow funded as a Simons Foundation awardee of the Life Sciences Research Foundation, working at Boston University with Allyson Sgro of the HHMI/Janelia Research Campus. She completed her PhD working with Hopi Hoekstra at Harvard University to understand the evolution and genetics of local adaptation using forest and prairie deer mice as a model system.
Alyssa Hernandez, Assistant Professor of Biology. Dr. Hernandez currently studies bio-inspired adhesive devices for robotic applications. Because she was initially trained as a biologist before transitioning to engineering for her postdoctoral work, she uses a holistic approach for device design, integrating multiple fields like ecology, evolutionary biology, and biomechanics. She uses diverse animal groups (e.g. clingfish, insects) as inspiration for this work, developing tools that can improve a variety of real-world applications. She is also interested in using these fabricated models as tools for biological research, producing studies that test biomechanical hypotheses.She wants her research to highlight how both biology and engineering can inform each other, producing appropriate models for engineering applications or comparative morphological studies.
Kate Huffer, Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology. Dr. Huffer is a biophysicist who studies the ion channels involved in cellular excitability. They are interested in the relationship between the structure and function of proteins, particularly Transient Receptor Potential (TRP) channels. They use electrophysiology to study channel function and computational methods to compare channel structures, building on the recent “resolution revolution” in cryo-electron microscopy.
Brooke Jude, Associate Professor of Biology (Website). Brooke Jude is a microbiologist who studies isolates of microorganisms found in various (local and foreign) aquatic sources. She is currently investigating the mechanisms that aquatic bacteria use to bind to surfaces in the environment. She uses classic microbiological techniques for isolation and culture of the strains, and identifies organisms via modern sequence analysis. Investigations within the lab also include molecular cloning to create deletion strains, biofilm assays, protein expression, tissue culture binding assays and investigation into bacterial behavior within microbial communities.
Melanie Pereira, Biology Lab Coordinator. Melanie Pereira joined Bard College as the Laboratory Coordinator for the Biology lab in 2024. Her education started at Dutchess Community College and then transferred to SUNY New Paltz where she earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Biology with a minor in Chemistry. Melanie has gained previous work experience as a Laboratory Assistant in both biology and chemistry labs.
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Felicia Keesing, David and Rosalie Rose Distinguished Professor of Science, Mathematics, and Computing (Website). Felicia Keesing is a community ecologist who studies the consequences of interactions among species. Since 1995, she has studied how African savannas function when the large, charismatic animals — like elephants, buffaloes, zebras, and giraffes — disappear. She also studies how interactions among species influence the probability that humans will be exposed to infectious diseases. Keesing’s disease research has primarily focused on three tick-borne diseases: Lyme disease, anaplasmosis, and babesiosis. She is particularly interested in how species diversity affects pathogen transmission. Keesing is a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, and received the International Cosmos Prize in 2022.
Gabriel Perron, Associate Professor of Biology. Gabriel G. Perron is an evolutionary biologist who studies the emergence of medically important traits in a broad range of microorganisms. His research uses a combination of real-time evolution experiments, genomic and metagenomic approaches, and field studies to understand how bacteria evolve antimicrobial resistance. Using different microbial systems, including bacteria such as Salmonella, Dr. Perron work seeks to understand the impact of human activity on the presence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in natural environments and its possible impact on public health issues. More recently, Dr. Perron has been also studying the impact of human activity on microbial communities found in Polar Regions.
Bruce Robertson, Associate Professor of Biology. Bruce Robertson is a conservation ecologist. His research focuses on questions that address important conservation issues, but that also provide fundamental insights into ecological theory. Broadly speaking, he investigates the direct and indirect impacts of human activities on biodiversity, species persistence and species interactions with special emphasis on how rapidly changing environments may disrupt evolved relationships and trigger maladaptation. He is especially interested in cases in which novel environments trigger animals to actually prefer to make inappropriate, detrimental and often dangerous decisions. These scenarios are known as evolutionary traps. Traps are an emerging conservation problem that can contribute population declines in species of concern. He collaborates extensively on a variety of projects including a study of the impact of new forms of pollution (polarized light pollution) on aquatic insects, and research investigating how to grow next generation bioenergy crops that facilitate the conservation of biodiversity. Trained as an ornithologist, Bruce increasingly uses arthropods, mammals and plants as study organisms.
Michael Tibbetts, Professor of Biology Mike Tibbetts is a molecular biologist who uses zebrafish as a model to investigate questions related to hearing. The lateral line system of zebrafish is comprised of structures, called neuromasts, that contain specialized cells, called hair cells, that are remarkably similar to the hair cells in our inner ear, which are responsible for converting sound waves into electrical signals that are sent to the brain. One line of investigation in the lab is based on the fact that hair cells must maintain a precise orientation in order to send sensical information about the direction of water flow across the body to the zebrafish brain. However, hair cells also need to change positions within neuromasts in order to fill in where old hair cells have died and to accommodate the formation of new ones.
.Rob Todd, Assistant Professor of Biology (Website) Dr. Robert (Rob) Todd is a microbiologist, educator, and enthusiast of science outreach. His research focuses on genome instability and adaptation in the human fungal pathogen Candida albicans. Beyond typical laboratory research, Dr. Todd is interested in developing curricula and outreach opportunities that increase (and support) diversity and representation in science. Dr. Todd has worked as a Citizen Science faculty member at Bard since 2020, and is now happy to join Bard Biology as a Visiting Assistant Professor.
Dr. Dumaine Williams. Dr. Williams graduated from Bard College with a degree in biology, received an MA in education leadership from Montclair State University, and a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Stony Brook University. He then completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Mount Sinai School of Medicine, focusing on endocrinology, molecular pharmacology, and systems therapeutics research. His areas of research and teaching include anatomy, endocrinology, physiology, epidemiology, and health inequity. Dr. Williams is Bard College's Vice President and Dean of the Early Colleges and Vice President for Student Affairs. Previously, he served as founding principal of the Bard Early College campus in Cleveland, Ohio and as the Dean of the Bard Early College campus in Newark, New Jersey.
Erin Carter, Biology Lab Manager Erin holds a degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Wells College, and started her career at Cornell University in the Bacteriology Department of the Animal Health Diagnostic Lab. She later worked in the Bacteriology Research & Development group at American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), where she developed a fondness for pathogenic bacteria and was able to characterize and work with novel bacterial strains. Since joining Bard College in 2023, she finds working closely with faculty and students in support of their classes and individual projects very rewarding.
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