Current and Recent

Students

Mia Tayler Waters


Mia completed an undergraduate honors thesis in our lab, then continued in the lab first as a technical assistant and then as a Master’s student studying  the evolution of complex adaptations, specifically complex variation in floral scent. Her work has been on understanding the genetics of floral scent, how variation in floral scent influences coevolved interactions between plants and pollinators, and how floral scent might be affected by rapidly changing environments. After completing her degree, she has continued to work on analyses of additional data from her time in our lab, while also now pursuing a doctoral degree at the University of British Columbia.

Elyse Doria


Elyse graduated with her B.S. in Plant Sciences, and also was a Research Assistant in the Thompson lab since Summer 2018. She is specialized in scent collections, scent chemistry analysis through gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, and plant care. In her Spring Quarter ‘19, Elyse completed her thesis studying the variation in green leaf volatiles in different species and populations of Lithophragma. After graduating, she accepted a position at Dricolls, working on analyses of plant compounds in their chemistry lab. She aspires to continue her education and is interested in learning more about the complex chemical interactions of plants and their pollinators.

Kris Strand

Kris was an undergraduate assistant in the lab between 2018 and 2020, helping with projects on  variation in production of volatile chemicals in genetically divergent populations of plant species.

Recurring Visiting Collaborators and Current/Recent Sabbatical Visitors

Magne Friberg


Magne Friberg, who is a Senior Lecturer at Lund University, is collaborating on research on biochemical diversification of floral signals in coevolving interactions with pollinators. Magne was a postdoctoral associate in the lab, before returning to Sweden to continue his career there. The collaboration between our laboratories has continued for more than a decade and includes a new generation of scientists working with us. See, for example, Friberg et al. (2013, 2017) Annals of Botany, Friberg et al. (2014) Journal of Chemical Ecology, and Friberg et al. (2019) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, or visit his website.

Paulo Guimarães


Paulo Guimarães, who is a faculty member at the University of Sao Paulo, is a regular extended visitor to the lab and ongoing collaborator. Our collaboration started many years ago when he was a postdoctoral associate in our lab and has continued with ever since. Our labs are involved in collaborative studies of coevolution in large networks of mutualistic species such as plants and their pollinators and frugivores. See, for example, Guimarães et al. (2011) Ecology Letters, Thompson et al. (2013) PNAS, Gibert et al. (2014) American Naturalist, Fernandes et al. 2019) American Naturalist, and Madeiros et al. (2019) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

Pedro Jordano


Pedro Jordano, who is a research professsor at the Estación Biológica de Doñana (CSIC) in Sevilla, Spain, is a regular visitor to the lab and ongoing collaborator. Together with Paulo Guimarães, and also our colleague Jordi Bascompte at the University of Zurich, we are analyzing network models of interactions among mutualistic species. See, for example, Guimarães et al. (2011) Ecology Letters, Guimarães et al. (2017) Nature, and Assis et al. 2020) Ecology Letters.

Cristina Lorenzi


Cristina Lorenzi is a faculty member at the University of Paris, who has collaborated with our lab on analysis of a large data set she has collected on the geographic mosaic of coevolution between social parasitic wasp species and their host wasp species. See Lorenzi and Thompson (2012) Evolution.

Hirokazu Toju


Hirokazu Toju, who is a faculty member at Kyoto University, has collaborated with our lab on analyses of his research on the structure of hyper-diverse networks of interactions between plants and fungi and the coevolutionary implications of network structure. See Toju et al. (2014) Nature Communications and Toju et al. (2015) Science Advances.

Rui-Wu Wang


Rui-Wu Wang, who is a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Kumming, spent a  sabbatical leave in our laboratory during 2013-2014 academic year to work on the evolution of costs and benefits in mutualistic interactions.

Robert Raguso


Robert Raguso, who the former chair of the the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University, spent a sabbatical leave in our laboratory during 2014 to continue our collaboration on research on biochemical diversification of floral signals in coevolving interactions with pollinators. We have collaborated on geographic and phylogenetic patterns of diversification of plant volatile chemicals across ecosystems. See Friberg et al. (2013) Annals of Botany, Friberg et al. (2014) Journal of Chemical Ecology, and Raguso et al. (2015) Natural Product Reports.

Florian Schiestl


Florian Schiestl, who is a faculty member in the Department of Plant Systematics at the University of Zurich, has collaborated with us on geographic and phylogenetic patterns of diversification in the response of pollinating insects to plant chemical volatiles, and the process of chemical coevolution between plants and insects. He was a research visitor to our lab in 2015 and spent a sabbatical in our laboratory during 2016. See Schiestl et al. (2021) Arthropod-Plant Interacdtions.

Paula Lemos-Costa


Paula is a postdoctoral associate at the University of Chicago, where she continued her work after completeing her doctoral at the University of Campinas working on mathematical models of coevolution. She was a multi-month visitor in our lab in 2016, during which we considered ways of modeling coevolution in small networks of interacting species. Working together with her doctoral advisor, Marcus Aquiar, we continued our collaboration on coevolutionary models after her stay in our lab. See Lemos-Costa et al. (2017) Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Karin Gross


Karin is a lecturer at the University of Salzburg. She began working with Magne Friberg’s lab and our lab as a postdoctoral associate studying evolutionary processes that cause and maintain the intriguingly high variation in morphological and chemical traits found within and among populations of some plant species. She mainly focuses on chemically-mediated communication traits involved in coevolving plant-pollinator interactions and the role of polyploidization on trait diversification in plants.

Malin Undin


Malin, who is a former Master’s student in the Magne Friberg group collaborating with our lab, studies diversity and diversification from an ecological, evolutionary and conservation perspective. Malin mainly focuses on the role of species community composition and other ecological differences across geographical distribution ranges. After working with the group of us on plants and pollinators, she left for New Zealand to complete a doctorate on population divergence in kiwis. She has continued to work with us on analyses of data on trait diversification in coevolving plants and pollinators.

Recent Students

Chris Schwind


Chris studied how environmental change, including climate change, may alter the geographic distribution of interactions between coevolving plants and pollinators. He focused, as an exemplar, on coevolution of prodoxid moths and their host plants. These include some of the most highly coevolved interactions between plants and insects, and they show great geographic variation in their coevolved traits. After completing his graduate work, Chris became a staff biologist at Creekside Center for Earth Observation,

Daniela Ruiz


Daniela helped us assess the genetics of coevolving traits in plants and insects, and helped evaluate patterns of visitation of floral-visiting insects captured with time-lapse photography. In recent years, she has worked as fish culturist for Idaho Fish and Game.

Weijie Zhao

Weijie graduated with her B.S. in Biology in Spring 2019, and was a Research Assistant in the Thompson lab for two years. She assisted with all aspects of plant growth and care, scent collections, and hand pollinations for multiple projects in the lab. She helped establish early protocols and conduct trials for collecting green leaf volatiles in Lithophragma.

Micah Sabbah


 Micah is a 2019 graduate in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and was a Research Assistant in the Thompson lab for two years. His research primarily involved assessing floral morphology and executing scent collections of Lithophragma; focusing on L. bolanderi and L. affine, and L. parviflorum species. Micah helped conduct early trials in the evaluation of green leaf volatiles found in Lithophragma. Micah looks to continue his education after graduation in hopes of better understanding the complexities of the chemical interactions between plants and their pollinators.

Kai Larrieu


Kai helped the lab in assessing the genetics of coevolving traits in plants and insects.He analyzed the differences among seeds and the amount of seeds produced by each plant. He is most interested in studying the fitness differences among plants as well as trying to implement new techniques for raising plants.

Science Internship Program (SIP) summer 2019 interns

Jesus Valdez and Minh Quan Dinh joined the lab over the summer of 2019 as ambitious rising high school seniors. They helped collect and analyze morphological measurements from hundreds of flowers in an ongoing hybridization study assessing the inheritance of floral trait variation in Lithophragma.

Past Postdoctoral Associates

Karin Gross, University of Zurich (split between Magne Friberg’s lab during much of the year and our lab during field seasons)

Magne Friberg, University of Uppsala

Britt Koskella, University of California, Berkeley

Paulo Guimarães, Jr., University of Sao Paulo

Anna-Liisa Laine, University of Helsinki

Samantha Forde, The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

Jason Hoeksema, University of Mississippi

Mariana Cuautle, University of the Americas, Puebla

Catherine Fernandez, BD Biosciences

Ryan Calsbeek, Dartmouth University

James Richardson, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

Niklas Janz, University of Stockholm

Diane Wagner, University of Alaska, Fairbanks

Olle Pellmyr, University of Idaho