People

We strive to provide an equitable, inclusive, and inspiring research environment. We welcome members irrespective of race, religion, gender identification, sexual orientation, age, or disability status and appreciate diverse perspectives. We are committed to supporting black and other minoritized students in our lab and in STEM. See the how_we_work repository on our lab GitHub account to learn more about our lab workflow and policies.

Current Members

Lauren Buckley, Professor

CV, Google Scholar, Wiki

Lauren joined the UW Biology Department in July 2013. She previously majored in Biology and Math as an undergrad at Williams College, conducted graduate research at Stanford, held postdoctoral fellowships at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis and the Santa Fe Institute, and was on the faculty at the University of North Carolina. Some days it feels like we’re making progress in improving forecasts of ecological and evolutionary responses to climate change; other days it feels like a foolhardy enterprise. Most days are fun. Lauren enjoys tromping around the mountains of Colorado chasing butterflies and grasshoppers during resurvey projects examining responses to recent climate change. Checking out the sites in winter on skis is her favorite. She is excited to be starting a local project where she can walk to a field site from her office.

Monica Sheffer, Postdoc

Monica received her PhD from the University of Greifswald in Germany, as part of the “RESPONSE” graduate training group, which focuses on understanding how organisms respond to novel and changing environments. Monica employs interdisciplinary approaches to address this issue, and her work aims to integrate information from all levels of biological organization, from the molecular and physiological level, up to phenotypic outcomes for individuals, and how those outcomes shape population dynamics. At the University of Washington, Monica is studying how survival and fecundity constraints vary with elevation in a montane grasshopper system.

Julia Smith, Graduate student

Julia is interested in integrating quantitative and empirical methods to understand the ecological impacts of climate change. In the Buckley lab, she studies grasshopper thermoregulatory behavior and energetics (see the field season picture on the left). She is modeling how climate change may have affected behavior, energetics, and ultimately fitness over the past 70 years. She is also passionate about education (especially teaching quantitative methods in biology) and hopes to get more involved in education research soon! In her free time, she plays guitar, hangs out with her ill-mannered cat, plays board games with friends, and makes elaborate color-coded weekly schedules in Excel that she will never actually follow.

Taylor Hatcher, Research Technician

Taylor comes from Wyoming, where she received her bachelor’s in Biology at the University of Wyoming. While at the University of Wyoming, she conducted and participated in undergraduate and post-bachelor research on how extreme and varying temperatures impact various species of bumble bees. In the Buckley Lab, Taylor is a Research Technician on board to assist in the research associated with the WARP (Washington Resurvey of Pierids) Project. Taylor is broadly interested in thermal physiology and how climate change impacts pollinators’ life history traits. Taylor is passionate about all things animal-related and loves having the opportunity to work with live animals in the lab and the field. When she’s not in the lab, you’ll find her indulging in her love for the outdoors, accompanied by her dog, usually hiking or mountain biking.

Anna Brasket, Research Technician

Anna received her bachelor’s in Biology at the University of Washington. Anna has been with the Buckley Lab since 2023, and has been involved in both grasshopper and butterfly research in the lab. She is joining us as a Research Technician for the Summer 2025 field season to lead research related to the WARP Project. She is especially interested in ecological and environmental responses to climate change, and applying these ideas to the conservation of the places she loves. Anna is always striving to be outdoors and enjoys the opportunities she has to combine being in beautiful places with doing research.

Spike Pike, Research Technician

Spike received her Bachelor’s from UC Berkeley, where she studied Integrative Biology and worked at the Essig Museum of Entomology and the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. She has worked on a number of taxa in the field and the lab, including mantis shrimp, legless lizards, and Eucalyptus trees, and is broadly interested in evolutionary biology, phylogeny, and natural history. She joined the Buckley lab as a Research Technician in 2025 to work on Pierid responses to climate change for WARP. She spends her free time dancing Lindy Hop and uploading her insurmountable backlog of plant photos to iNaturalist.

Gwen Shlichta, Affiliate / Collaborator

Gwen is a faculty member at Edmonds College. She is collaborating with us to repeat butterfly research she conducted as a technician in the Kingsolver Lab at UW. She is involving Edmonds undergraduates via a Course Based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) focused on Pierid butterflies and also conducts education research. She also maintains a P. rapae colony we use for research and collaboration. Gwen was an undergrad at Washington State University, conducted graduate research at the University of Maryland, and was a postdoc at the University of Neuchâtel Institute of Biology in Switzerland.

Maxine McCormick, Undergraduate researcher

Maxine McCormick is an undergraduate student attending the University of Washington. She is in her senior year studying general biology and was introduced to the Buckley Lab when taking a class taught by Professor Buckley. Maxine is interested in the impacts of climate change on the environment and contributing to the preservation of wild places. In her free time she loves getting outside through her hobbies including fly fishing, backpacking, running, and gardening.

Jennifer Lopez, Undergraduate researcher

Originally from the Bay Area, California, Jennifer relocated to Washington in 2019. She attended Edmonds College, where she enrolled in CURE (Course Based Undergraduate Research Experience) courses under the guidance of Dr. Gwen Slichta, leading to her introduction to the Buckley group. Her previous research involved investigating the mechanisms behind cannibalistic behavior in Pieris rapae larvae and exploring the influence of microbiome diversity on susceptibility and developmental delay in P. rapae larvae, based on their ecological interactions and diet. Currently, she is an undergraduate student at the University of Washington, majoring in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. Jennifer maintains a broad interest in developmental biology and sex-specific hormones, with a particular focus on understanding the distinctive aspects of female physiology. She has a particular interest in exploring the relationships between immunology, pathology, metabolism, and sex-specific hormones. Jennifer is pursuing a career in medicine, with aspirations of becoming an Obstetrician-Gynecologist (OB-GYN) and a Reproductive Endocrinologist.

Former Members

Graduate Students

Anthony Cannistra, Ph.D. 2020

Tony was co-trained in Computer Science and Biology at Tufts University. Before starting graduate school at UW, he was a naturalist at the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies in Aspen, Colorado. He’s interested in advancing the world by leading innovative computational approaches to hard problems. He participated in the UW IGERT in Big Data and Data Science. Tony conducted research aimed at improving the ability of species’ traits to predict distributions and distribution shifts, leveraging novel sources of environmental data, and predicting the ecological impacts of marine heatwaves. Tony is currently a data scientist at Gaia GPS.

Nassima Bouzid, Ph.D. 2019

Sima received her PhD in June 2019 for her dissertation entitled “Diversification and Local Adaptation in Western Fence Lizards (Sceloporus occidentalis)”. She conducted undergraduate research at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley, where she was introduced to herpetology and trained in museum collection management. For her dissertation work, Sima integrated ecophysiology and genomics to study local adaptation of Sceloporus lizards along an elevation gradient in Yosemite National Park. The research aimed to provide insight into the evolutionary basis of climate change responses. She was co-advised by Adam Leaché. Sima is currently a data scientist at Invitae.

Liang Ma, Visiting Ph.D. student 2015-2016

Liang visited our research group during his Ph.D. with Wei-guo Du at the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Liang’s research focused on understanding the relationship between thermal variation over space and time and the physiology and life history of ectotherms. He parameterized mechanistic models with reaction norms derived from empirical studies to generate new insights about the process of thermal adaptation at both local and global scales. Liang is currently a postdoc at Princeton.

Heidi MacLean, Ph.D. 2015

Heidi worked on thermal biology and examined how insects, butterflies in particular, are evolving and acclimating in response to climate change. Heidi was the lab’s first member at UNC and continues to be involved in the lab, but Joel Kingsolver at UNC served as her primary advisor once Lauren moved to UW. Heidi is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Bioscience at Aarhus University working with Johannes Overgaard, Jesper Sørensen, and Torsten Kristensen.

Postdocs

Chris Johnson, 2021-2022

Chris received a PhD from UCLA working on how temperature and resources influence insect population dynamics in the Amarasekare Lab. He conducted further work combining theory with field and laboratory experiments to study how climate and species interactions affect ecological and evolutionary dynamics in the Bronstein lab at U Arizona and the Levine lab at ETH Zurich and Princeton. In our group, Chris returned to research exploring the evolution of insect thermal sensitivity. He’s now working with Sabine Rumpft at the University of Basel.

Murilo Marochi, Visiting postdoc 2019

Murilo visited from the São Paulo State University in Brazil to work on developing ecophysiological models of crab responses to climate change.

Rory Telemeco, 2014-2016

Rory worked on the potential for lizard behavioral plasticity to buffer sensitivity to climate change. Rory is now a faculty member at California State University Fresno

Heather Kharouba, NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow 2015-2016

Heather is interested in the causes and consequences of ecological responses to global change. She was an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow associated with the lab working on the relationship between phenological and distribution shifts. Previously, she was a Center for Population Biology Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Davis where she worked with Rick Karban and Louie Yang. She completed my PhD in the Department of Zoology and Biodiversity Research Centre at the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Mark Vellend. She joined the Department of Biology at the University of Ottawa as an Assistant Professor in September 2016.

Dolly Crawford, 2009-2010

Dolly worked with the lab on using biophysical models to hindcast changes in Neotoma distributions and body size over the last 40,000 years. Dolly subsequently was a postdoctoral associate at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. She is now faculty in the Department of Biology and Toxicology at Ashland University.

Research scientists

Jared Haar 2024-2025

Jared worked as an honors student in the Buckley Lab as an undergraduate student, assisting and massively contributing to two field work seasons. Once he graduated with his bachelors, he continued in the Buckley Lab as a research aide. Jared is now a California Climate Action Corps Fellow.

Ben Mous, 2024

Ben worked with the group applying his extensive butterfly knowledge and expertise. His efforts have been a valued contribution to the WARP project progression. Ben is now working towards his PhD in Biochemistry in California.

Abby Meyer, 2020-2022

Abby worked with the group applying her quantitative skills to vastly further many aspects of the TrEnCh project. Check out her contributions to TrEnCh-ed and TrEnCh-IR in particular.

Aji John, 2017-2019

Aji worked on the TrEnCh project, particularly TrenchR and microclimate tools.

Undergraduate researchers

• Lucie Reizian 2024-
• Marcos Alvarez 2024-
• Jared Haar 2023-2024
• Nahom Alemayehu 2023
• Alexander Juan 2023
• Varun Krishnakumar 2023
• Max Oberholtzer 2023
• Alice Le 2022-2023
• Rachael Ren 2021-2022 (NSF Graduate Research Fellowship recipient)
• Isaac Caruso 2020-2021
• Yutaro Sakairi 2019-2021
• Andrew Arakaki 2016-2017
• Bryan Briones Ortiz 2015-2017
• Grace Burgin 2015-2017
• Damir Zhaksilikov 2016-2017
• Kyle Kreiger 2016
• Jesse Ma 2015
• Teodora Rautu 2015
• Adetimi Akinniya 2015
• Evan Kirk 2013-2013
• Parth Shah 2012-2013
• Ethan Miller 2012-2013
• Joseph Grigg 2010-2013
• Edward Shin 2011
• Madison Foushee 2010-2011 (honors thesis)
• Stephanie Waaser 2010

Educators

• Nick Verbanic, Lake Washington High School, 2020
• Macy Zwanzig, Redmond High School, 2020