Faculty Research Interests
If you are a senior undergraduate student, graduate student or prospective graduate student looking for a thesis supervisor, give careful consideration to how your research interests match those of your prospective supervisor. If, for instance, you are accepted into the MSc in Integrative Biology program, you will be committing to a two-year relationship in their lab. If you become a PhD student in Biological and Chemical Sciences, it will be a four-year relationship. Consider making arrangements to come to Laurier to visit their lab and meet with their current students.
Be aware that individual faculty members may not be taking new students from time to time: for example, they may be going away on sabbatical or have no openings in their lab for the term in which you are thinking of starting.
Jennifer Baltzer: Comparative tree biology and responses of forests to global change.
Danve Castroverde: Molecular mechanisms of plant immunity; plant defence gene regulation; temperature signalling in plants.
Mihai Costea: Systematics, biodiversity and biogeography of angiosperms.
Joseph Culp: Responses of northern aquatic ecosystems to climate change; multiple stressor effects on benthic food webs of rivers.
Douglas Deutschman: Conservation biology, population dynamics, and biostatistics.
Stephanie DeWitte-Orr: Investigating innate immune responses to virus infections with a focus on dsRNA-mediated responses.
Derek Gray: Limnology, zooplankton ecology, and environmental change.
Erin Leonard: Physiology and ecotoxicology of animals.
Tristan Long: Sexual selection and conflict, genetics of behaviour and speciation.
Deborah MacLatchy: Determining source, identity, and mechanisms of action of anthropogenic contaminants on fish reproduction, development and growth.
Allison McDonald: Environmental stress physiology and biochemistry; role of terminal oxidases in respiration and photosynthesis.
Jim McGeer: Stress physiology of aquatic animals; environmental toxicology and risk assessment of metals.
Gabriel Moreno-Hagelsieb: Comparative and functional genomics; stability and evolution of genetic functional modules.
Jonathan Newman: Grassland ecology, ecological impacts of climate change, invasive species, metabolomics and proteomics as methods for studying plant-endophyte interactions, mathematical modelling, plant-fungal interactions, plant-herbivore interactions.
Scott Ramsay: Reproductive ecology of songbirds.
Robin Slawson: Survival and persistence of natural populations of potential pathogens from surface waters.
Matthew Smith: Mechanisms of protein targeting and import into chloroplasts.
Kevin Stevens: Wetland plant ecology; plant growth in wet areas.
Frances Stewart: Wildlife biology, conservation, and ecological forecasting.
Heidi Swanson: Northern aquatic ecology; fish life history, food webs, and mercury bioaccumulation in northern aquatic ecosystems.
Joel Weadge: Microbial glycobiology; structure-function analysis of proteins that synthesize and export bacterial cellulose.
Michael Wilkie: Environmental physiology and toxicology of aquatic vertebrates.
Jonathan Mark Wilson: Fish molecular physiology with a focus on elucidating the mechanisms of ion regulation within evolutionary and environmental contexts.
Zhongwei Zou: Plant-pathogen interactions: sustainable agriculture & Integrated Pest Management.