Marcos da Cruz – Marcos joined the lab in Fall 2019 from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees and researched relationships within the Rodent family Cricetidae. His research in the Lanier Lab focuses on the role of population size and biogeographic history in shaping the distribution of adaptive and neutral genetic variation in small mammals.
Madelyn Kirsch — Madelyn is a Master’s student from Montana, who joined the lab in Fall 2022. Her research focuses on understanding the role of habitat, phylogeny, and ecology in shaping the salamander microbiome.
Miranda Theriot — Miranda joined the Lanier Lab in Fall 2020 after completing her Master’s research at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her PhD research focuses on using museum specimens to understand anthropogenic change, including body size responses to shifts in temperature, climate, and habitat.
Vy Dinh — Vy is an undergraduate researcher through the OU FYRE program, who joined the lab in Spring 2023. Her research focuses on exploring the yield and repeatability of recovering genomic DNA from degraded samples.
Drew Dantz — Drew is an undergraduate researcher through the OU FYRE program, who joined the lab in Spring 2023. His research focuses on understanding the prevalence of the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome in overwintering Oklahoma bats.
Andrew Hughes — Andrew is an undergraduate researcher who joined the lab in Fall 2022. His research focuses on using geometric morphometrics to understand the impacts of anthropogenic habitat change.
Noah Lemons — Noah is an undergraduate researcher who joined the lab in Spring 2023. His research focuses on using geometric morphometrics to understand the impacts of anthropogenic habitat change and the role of changing age structure on shaping body size trends.
Lab Alumni
Addison Allen — Addison first joined the Lanier Lab as an undergraduate researcher in the fall of 2017 and became a Master’s student in Fall 2018. Her research focused on how community assembly and population structure of mammals changes during post-fire succession in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
Robert Beers — Robert is an undergraduate from Tulsa who joined the Lanier Lab after doing stellar work in Field Mammalogy. After joining us for the fire succession work in August, he stayed on to help us catalogue and identify the mammals from our 2018 field season, and presented his work at several regional and international meetings.
Leah Boskovich — Leah was an undergraduate researcher through the OU FYRE program, who joined the lab in Spring 2021. Her research focused on understanding the prevalence of the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome in overwintering Oklahoma bats.
Kim Jones— Kim was undergraduate researcher who joined the lab in Fall 2019 as a FYRE student, and continued on to do her undergraduate honors thesis. Her FYRE research focused on identifying the presence of the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome on bat specimens taken from our collections, in order to track both historical prevalence and understand the potential for cross-contamination in a collections setting. Her honors research used genomic techniques to understand gene flow and population differentiation in collared pikas. Since graduation she has gone on to medical school.
Marisa Pitts — Marisa joined the lab in Spring of 2021 as an undergraduate researcher. Her research, conducted with Miranda Theriot, focused on understanding changes in eastern cottontail body size over time using morphometric measurements from museum specimens.
Jess Martin — Jess was an undergraduate researcher through the OU FYRE program, who joined the lab in Spring 2021. Her research focused on understanding the severity and degree of conservation threat that Rabbit Hemorrhagic Disease Variant 2 (RHDV2) posed to North American lagomorphs.
Allie Carlile — Allie joined the Lanier Lab as an undergraduate research student in the fall of 2019. Her research focused on understanding the impacts of fire succession on small mammal abundance and movements, using data collected in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
Sean Lindley — Sean joined the Lanier Lab in Fall 2018 as an undergraduate researcher. He worked with Addison on a project focused on using specimens to understand the changes in deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus) populations related to fire disturbance. He has since gone on to pursue a master’s degree at Humboldt State University.
Lisa Ratliff — Lisa joined the Lanier Lab in Fall 2018, as an undergraduate researcher, with an interest in museum collections and biodiversity outreach. Her research focused on using museum specimen records to understand reproductive trends in heteromyid rodents, understanding white-nose syndrome in bats, and evaluating the best approaches for sample preservation and storage from pika field work. Lisa went on to earn a master’s degree in education from OU.
Hannah Roe — Hannah, a double-major in biology and psychology, joined the Lanier Lab in Fall of 2021 as an undergraduate researcher. Her research focused on understanding the effect of evolution knowledge on shaping the beliefs in polarizing scientific topics, building on her time as an undergraduate TA for evolution.
Caleigh Schultz — Caleigh joined the Lanier Lab in Spring 2021 as an undergraduate researcher. She worked with Miranda on a project focused on evaluating collection biases in museum specimens relative to urban habitats.
