Gareth Russell, Associate Professor

Gareth is interested in community ecology, conservation biology and computational applications in both of these areas. For more information on these research areas (and by extension, those of the lab), click on the Research link on your left.

For more information on Gareth, see his CV and his Research Interests.

russell@njit.edu

Kimberly Russell, Research Associate

Until recently Kimberly was a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, but has recently taken up a University Lecturer position at NJIT. Despite a heavy teaching load she will has her own lab there, but is always welcome in ours (especially as she heps to advise Sarah Kornbluth and Denise Hewitt)! Kim's own web site is here.

krussell@njit.edu

Jessica Schnell, PhD Student

Jessica has just passed her dissertation proposal defense and is starting the long, hard slog to the finish line! She is applying the concept of metapopulation capacity to fragmented ranges in order to improve our understanding of extinction threat.

jschnell@pegasus.rutgers.edu

Sarah Kornbluth, PhD Student

Sarah is a second-year PhD student who is currently working on understanding the ecology and dynamics of bee communities in New Jersey. She just passed her qualifying exam and is developing her dissertation proposal.

skorn@pegasus.rutgers.edu

Denise Hewitt, PhD Student

Denise is about to take her qualifying exam! She is a student in the Ecology and Evoution graduate program at Rutgers New Brunswick. She will be joining us for her disseration research, studying the effect of field margin management strategies on bee visitiation rates in the fields themselves.

dhewitt@rci.rutgers.edu

Tanya Lubansky, PhD Student

Tanya is a second-year PhD student who has been working on the Automated Fish ID project.

tml5@njit.edu

Anthony Brusa, PhD Student

Anthony is a second-year PhD student.

dt3r@sbcglobal.net

Andrew Mashintonio, PhD Student

Anthony is a first-year PhD student whose interests include the ecology and conservation of vertebrates.

amash03@gmail.com

Abraham Rosales, Graduate Student (NJIT)

Abraham was the first UBM student to pass though this lab. He worked with Gareth on a project modeling the metapopulation dynamics of colonially nesting wading birds. Despite discoving an aptitude for field observation (Abraham was the first to spot a deer faun on the Isle of Meadows off the west shore of Staten Island), he has moved on to graduate studies in Computer Science, where he hopes to learn how to predict stock market fluctuations.

adr6@njit.edu

Temmy Brotherson, Undergraduate (NJIT)

Temmy is a UBM student who, as an undergraduate, worked with another student, Karina (see below) and Gareth on a project to adapt the traditional model of Island Biogeography by adding an ‘active emigration’ component that was suggested by earlier work. This work is currently being prepared for publication.

ti3@njit.edu

Karina Aliaga, Undergraduate (NJIT)

See above.

kla3@njit.edu

Priti Dhabekar, MA Student

Priti was a Masters student who graduated in Spring 2009. She performed a greenhouse experiment that examines the interaction between competitive processes and nutrient distribution on the root growth of a grass. Priti is about to move on to a PhD program in Microbial Ecology at Texas State University. We wish her well.

dhabekarp@yahoo.com

Shahira Sanabria, Undergraduate (Rutgers)

Shahira has been working for the lab for over a year as a work-study research assistant, helping Kimberly with imaging spiders for her NSF-funded SPIDA project (automated species identification). This summer she will be working through an REU grant to Kimberly!

shahiras@pegasus.rutgers.edu

Catherine Morrison

Catherine is an undergraduate in NJIT's mathematics program who is working with another student (David, see below) and Gareth as part of NJIT's NSF-funded Undergraduate Biology and Mathematics (UBM) Training Program. Catherine and David are helping to develop some tools for estimating Markov models of community assembly from real-world data, and performing simulated experiments to help put together a proposal for a series of actual experiements.

David Hamoui

See above.