Faculty

OEB brings together more than 75 faculty, providing critical mass needed for effective graduate training. Our faculty are drawn from 10 departments at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and from across the Five College System (Amherst, Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke, and Smith Colleges), as well as from off-campus institutions. OEB faculty are engaged in cutting edge research, with research clusters in four broad areas:

Animal Behavior

Behavioral ecology, communication, learning

Ecology

Community ecology, population ecology, landscape ecology, conservation biology

Evolutionary Biology

Evolution, phylogenetics, population genetics, molecular evolution

Organismal Biology

Physiology, morphology, paleontology

All OEB faculty are listed below. To help applicants to our graduate program locate a faculty sponsor, the faculty list can be filtered by four broad research areas. A list of faculty who are activiely seeking graduate students can be found HERE

Name	Research Interests
Annaliese Beery Assistant Professor, Departments of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Biology, Smith College	Neuroendocrinology of social behavior
Patricia Brennan Research Assistant Professor of Biology and Psychological & Brain Sciences	Evolutionary consequences of interactions between behavior, morphology and the environment
Bruce Byers Associate Professor of Biology	Acoustic communication in birds
Brian S. Cheng Assistant Professor, Environmental Conservation	Marine global change ecology and the dynamics of predator-prey interactions
Ethan D. Clotfelter Associate Professor of Biology, Amherst College	Reproductive behavior of birds and fishes
Alex Haro Adjunct Professor of Environmental Conservation Ecologist and Section Leader, Fish Passage Engineering S.O. Conte Anadromous Fish Research Center	Fish behavior and migration; fish passage
Peter W. Houlihan Senior Lecturer in Biology	Animal Behavior, Vertebrate Ecology, and Conservation Biology
Duncan J. Irschick Professor, Department of Biology	Functional Morphology, Evolution, and Behavioral Ecology
Elizabeth M. Jakob Professor, Biology Department	Animal behavior, especially perception, learning, and social behavior
Adrian Jordaan Assistant Professor, Environmental Conservation	Ecosystems, modeling, tagging, movement, trophic dynamics, diadromous, marine, fisheries, historical ecology
Jason M. Kamilar Assistant Professor of Anthropology	Comparative biology of primates and other mammals
Paul S. Katz Professor, Department of Biology	Neuroethology, central pattern generators, single neuron RNA-seq, developmental neuroscience, evolution of neural circuits, molluscan systems
Melinda Novak Professor, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences	Behavior of microtines and primates
Sarah Partan Associate Professor, School of Cognitive Science, Hampshire College	Visual and acoustic communication in mammals
Jeffrey E. Podos Professor, Department of Biology OEB Graduate Program Leader	Mechanisms and evolution of vertebrate behavior, bioacoustics
Luke Remage–Healey Associate Professor, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences	Neural basis of behavior
Laela Sayigh Assistant Professor of Animal Behavior, Hampshire College	Social behavior and communication of cetaceans (whales and dolphins)
Alexander Suvorov Assistant Professor, Environmental Health Sciences	Effects on behavior by environmental xenobiotics with endocrine disruptive properties
Ethan J. Temeles Professor of Biology, Amherst College	Foraging behavior; Territoriality; Intra- and Interspecific competition; Resource partitioning; Mutualism; Coevolution; Sexual dimorphisms and polymorphisms
Paige S. Warren Associate Professor of Environmental Conservation	Urban ecology, human-environment interactions, animal behavior