Lab News and Accomplishments

Nov 2010: Sandy Gillespie won the President’s Prize competition for her talk at the Canadian Entomological Society meeting for the 2nd consecutive year.

Oct 2010: Former postdoc Dr. Toby Kiers received 5 years of funding with a Dutch Vidi grant, and a tenure track position at Vrije University. Read more about it here.

July 2010: Nicole Soper Gorden has been awarded a Travel Grant from the Plant Population Ecology section to present her research at the August 2010 Ecological Society of America conference. Nicole will be a SEEDS mentor at the conference, and official student liaison to ESA's Education and Diversity programs.

May 2010: Nicole Soper Gorden has been awarded a Gilgut Fellowship from the Plant Biology Graduate program that will fund her fourth year of graduate school. This is a competitive award and honor in her program.

May 2010: Nick Barber's collaborative research has been accepted for publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Check out his webpage for more details...

April 2010: What an amazing month! Nicole Soper Gorden has been awarded an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement grant; hers was one of 12 proposals ranked 'highly competitive' out of 140 proposals total. Additionally, former Adler lab members Jen Fill and Ryder Diaz both received NSF GRFP Fellowships! Congratulations, all.

May 2009: Nelson Milano received two competitive fellowships in Entomology, the Burrell Memorial scholarship and the Frank R. Shaw Award Fund scholarship. Congratulations, Nelson!

April 2009: Nina Theis has accepted a tenure-track position at Elms College that will begin in Fall 2009. We will miss you, Nina!

Aug 2008: Andy Cavanagh successfully defended his Master's degree in Entomology. Congratulations, Andy!

May 2008: Lynn Adler, Ruth Hazzard and former post-doc Toby Kiers have a 3-year USDA NRI grant to study effects of above- and belowground mutualists and antagonistics on reproduction in cucumber that has been recommended for funding. More ice cream!

May 2008: Jen Fill had to decide between floods of acceptances for summer REU internships. She ultimately chose to work at Konza Praire in Kansas. You can read the chronicles of her adventures on her web page.

April 2008: Nicole Soper Gorden has been awarded $2600 from the Jane Hallenbeck Bemis Endowment scholarship from the UMass-Amherst Natural History Collections to conduct her summer research on jewelweed, its herbivores and pollinators.

Feb 2008: Sandy Gillespie's NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant has been recommended for funding! This is a nationally-competitive grant for PhD students and will provide research funds for the rest of Sandy's dissertation. Congratulations!

Feb 2008: Jen Fill has been selected for a competitive Howard Hughes Medical Institute scholarship for the research she will conduct this semester in collaboration with Holly Baltzer. Hurray Jen!

Dec 2007: Drs. Lynn Adler, Paige Warren (UMass-NRC Dept), and Rebecca Irwin (Dartmouth College, Dept of Biological Sciences) have received a 3-year NSF grant to study how urbanization affects natural selection via plant-insect interactions in Gelsemium sempervirens. Bring on the ice cream!
You can view a UMass article on the grant here.

Aug 2007: Liz Andrews' honors thesis appears as a publication in the Journal of Chemical Ecology, with Drs. Nina Theis and Lynn Adler as co-authors.

July 2007: Amanda Lentz successfully defended her PhD in the Department of Biology at Virginia Tech. Congratulations!

Mar 2007: In addition to the renewal of her Lotta Crabtree Fellowship, Sandy Gillespie received a three-year fellowship from NSERC, the Canadian Research Council. This is a highly competitive national award. Congratulations Sandy! Sandy also received summer research funds from the Essex County Beekeeper's Association, and from a Jane Hallenbeck Bemis Endowment scholarship from the UMass-Amherst Natural History Collections.

Dec 2006: Kristen Hladun successfully defended her Master's. Congratulations Kristen! She will begin her PhD in the Dept of Entomology at UC Riverside in March 2007.

Sept 2006: Sandy Gillespie received a renewal of her Lotta M. Crabtree Fellowship from the College of Natural Resources and the Environment to fund the fall semester of research.

July 2006: Dr. Toby Kiers received a 3 year independent research 'Veni' Grant from Dutch Science Foundation: Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO). She will work with Dr. Marcel G. van der Heijden in the Institute of Ecological Sciences, Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

May 2006: Liz Andrews received an Honor's Dean Award for excellence in her senior thesis research. Go Liz! Liz will be at UMass Amherst for one more year working towards her Master's degree in Entomology with Dr. Stephen Rich.

May 2006: Research by Lynn Adler and collaborator Rebecca Irwin of Dartmouth College is featured in a Science News article on nectar composition. Article PDF

March 2006: Liz Andrews received the Shaw Award for an outstanding undergraduate from the Entomology Division to purchase textbooks.

Jan 2006: Sandy Gillespie received a Lotta M. Crabtree Fellowship from the College of Natural Resources and the Environment to fund her spring semester of research.

Dec 2005: Dr. Nina Theis was awarded a $198,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study the role of floral scent in attracting pollinators and herbivores of a wild gourd. This award will fund a postdoctoral position in the lab for the next two years.

Nov 2005: A recent paper by Dr. Lynn Adler and collaborator Dr. Rebecca Irwin (2005 Ecology 86(11): 2968-2978) was featured in ScienceNow online.

May 2005: Kristen Hladun received the Gilgut Award, a one-year competitive fellowship, through the Plant Biology Graduate Program. This fellowship will fund the rest of her Master’s degree.

May 2005: Dr. Toby Kiers received the nationally competitive Darwin Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Graduate Program in Organismal and Evolutionary Biology at UMass Amherst. Toby joined the Adler lab as a postdoc in August.

March 2005: Amanda Lentz received a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant on her first submission.