The 32nd annual Ecology Graduate Student Symposium, held Jan. 30-31 at the Odum School of Ecology and online, offered more than 20 presentations, speed talks, poster sessions and a keynote lecture by Daniel J. Becker (PhD ’17).
Led by graduate students Kylie Green and Nuzha Baksh, plus a large steering committee, the event showcased student research at all stages of development. Presentations by 26 graduate students covered topics from “Hibernation as a potential amplifier of contamination stress in bats” to “Deep water transport capacity in savanna trees and grasses” to “Effects of thermal acclimation on learning in freshwater prey fish.”
The first day of presentations included a poster session featuring research by undergraduate students. Patricia Babb won the judges’ choice for “Habitat-based variation in amphibian communities within a tropical premontane wet forest in Costa Rica,” and Valor Lekas won the people’s choice award for “Uncovering patterns and drivers of bird collisions with windows on the UGA campus.”
With snow in the forecast, the keynote address was moved to the end of day one. Day two presentations were moved online, and the annual John K. Spencer Memorial 5K Run & Walk was postponed. The run is held in honor of John Spencer, a graduate student in the Odum School of Ecology and River Basin Center, who studied urban streams and was passionate about freshwater ecology, conservation and ecological restoration. A grant program in Spencer’s name supports graduate student research.
Becker’s keynote, “Forecasts and fieldwork: Linking host prediction with infectious disease dynamics,” discussed ongoing efforts of his group at the University of Oklahoma to study the who, where and when of zoonotic disease, with a heavy bias toward wild bat systems in the Americas. A disease ecologist and assistant professor of biology, Becker investigates the ecological and evolutionary drivers of infectious disease dynamics in wildlife and the risk of zoonotic spillover to humans. Bridging field research with advanced modeling and data-driven approaches, his work integrates spatiotemporal field studies of bats and songbirds with meta-analyses, epidemiological models and machine-learning approaches to understand how zoonotic pathogens spread within and among species, and how environmental changes may alter infection risk.
After earning his Ph.D. in Ecology at UGA in 2017, Becker conducted postdoctoral research on pathogen spillover at Montana State University and on animal migration through an Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellowship at Indiana University. His contributions to the field have been recognized with numerous honors, including the 2025 Early Career Fellow award from the Ecological Society of America, the Scialog Collaborative Innovation Award for Human and Agricultural Zoonotic Threats, and the Robert Lochmiller Award, from the SICB Division of Ecoimmunology.
GSS presenter awards went to Katie Schroeder and Matt Tatz, who tied for best full-length talk. Schroeder spoke on “Effects of temperature shift frequency and predictability on host-parasite interactions,” and Tatz discussed “Linking sociodemographic vulnerability with urban human-bird relationships in Orange County, Florida.” The award for best rapid talk went to Valeria Aspinall for “Utilizing bioacoustics to study a micro-endemic and critically endangered frog in northern Costa Rica.”
The highest scoring presenters for each session were Josiah Kaderis (session one), Matt Tatz (session two), Bell Scherick (session three), Valeria Aspinall and Kelsey Vaughn (session four), Christian Brown (session five), Abby Bickle (session six), Eliot Hall (session 7) and Dan Cryan (session eight).