People

I am interested in understanding how networks of interactions work. What are the rules behind them, what features stabilize them, and what makes them resilient or vulnerable, and how changes in one level permeates (cascades) to others.

My interest in biodiversity research initially arose through an obsession with the documentation and photography of butterflies in the Western Ghats of India, where I grew up. Before starting my PhD at OIST, I did a master’s in Wildlife Biology and Conservation at NCBS, Bangalore. For my PhD thesis, I aim to study the genomic architecture of convergent evolution in a group of fascinating ants called Strumigenys. To this end, I take comparative genomics and transcriptomics approaches in conjunction with fieldwork to study the genomes and gene expression patterns in the independent evolutions of the ultrafast trap-jaw mandibles in Strumigenys ants.

Please visit my website to know more about me!

Growing up interacting with various kinds of animals and plants in a quaint Himalayan town of India, I’ve always been fascinated by the diversity of life around us. My curiosity about understanding the natural world, led me to pursue a master’s in wildlife biology and conservation at NCBS, Bengaluru. I studied thermal ecology and morphological plasticity in wing color characteristics of Pierid butterflies for my master’s thesis. After my master’s, I spent a year studying plasticity in reproductive traits of Himalayan oak trees in response to excessive anthropogenic thinning of these forests. These past projects shaped my current and long-term research interests, i.e., understanding the ecological and evolutionary causes and consequences of developmental plasticity in organisms. My approach to research is question oriented and I am most interested in answering fundamental questions in ecology and evolutionary biology.

I’m Lazzat, from Kazakhstan. Before entering OIST, I studied at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan. For my undergraduate thesis I studied the evolution and epidemiology of HIV in Former Soviet Union countries. Here at OIST, during my rotations, I developed an interest in the evolutionary and ecological processes that shaped biodiversity. For my PhD I want to focus on biodiversity, biogeography and altitudinal adaptation of montane ants in Kazakhstan.

I am an Entomologist, and my research interests encompass systematics and taxonomy, biogeography, and morphological evolution of ants. For the last years, I worked with the ant genus Pheidole, focusing on its taxonomy and morphological evolution using a geometric morphometric framework to understand patterns of variation, integration, and modularity within and between its sub-castes. My current projects at Biodiversity and Biocomplexity Unit include comparative ant anatomy using 3D modeling, combined with geometric morphometrics and phylogenetic approaches to understand its morphological diversity and evolutionary history.

I am a technician working on molecular biology experiments in the Economo Unit, including metabarcoding of OKEON samples, invasive species detection, genomic library preparations, and others. I was born and raised in Fukuoka. I finished my master’s degree in Agricultural Science at Kyushu University, studying positive effects of functional food on metabolic diseases. I have previously worked at Ecology and Evolution Unit for 4 years and am experienced with DNA/RNA isolation from diverse organisms (fish, honeybee, mite, ant, and spider) and several library preparation methods for NGS platforms.

I learned methods of molecular biology during my PhD course and applied them later to study diverse biological processes: cell differentiation, cell electrogenicity, cell membrane fluidity regulation. Now I work on prediction bacteriophage genomes from metagenomic data. I hope to contribute to understanding of phage diversity at the genomic and community levels and their evolutionary relationships.

I was previously a research intern at Arilab and am now back as a research assistant. Before joining Arilab, I studied at the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa. During my bachelor’s and master’s, I studied ant fauna found on some Ryukyu Islands and analyzed the relationship between types of environment and ant diversity. My main tasks in the lab are to care for specimens and work on my research. My current research project studies the taxonomy of the genus Rhopalomastix in the Ryukyu Islands using morphological and phylogenetic analyses. I also work with OKEON to conduct workshops at high schools in Okinawa.

I recently completed my undergraduate studies at The City College of New York and a research intern in the Economo Unit. As an undergraduate, I studied the spatial diversity patterns of butterflies in the Philippines. As an intern, I transitioned to learn more about insect morphology and geometric morphometric methods, primarily focusing on Philippine butterfly wing and body size. Now as a research technician in the Arilab, I hope to support the lab through specimen curation, micro-CT scanning, and morphological segmentations. 

I am a natural history researcher interested in the evolution and diversification of life history traits of ants (social structure, morphological specialization, caste polymorphism, etc.). I am approaching this theme through fieldwork (observations and collections) and laboratory observations (observations and experiments with captive colonies). I describe the natural history of social and behavioral traits of ant species and discuss evolutionary history by comparing these traits.

From my undergraduate studies to Ph. D., I studied the life history of the non-army ant group of the subfamily Dorylinae at Kagawa University, Japan. I experienced fieldwork in tropical Southeast Asia, especially in Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam. During my master’s program, I spent one year at Chiang Mai University in Thailand as part of my Double Degree Program.

At Arilab, I will combine my natural history research approach with morphology using μCT to investigate the evolution of complexity in insect societies by comparing life history traits, behavior, and morphology. Specific projects will include 1) hunting tactics of the genus Strumigenys with their mandible morphology, and 2) the specialization of the life history traits and morphology of Dorylinae army ants.

I am an applied ecologist and my research focus till now has been on developing computational and molecular tools to monitor organisms and understand how they respond to change. Recently, I just finished my PhD at Newcastle University (UK) where I worked with large datasets from various high-throughput sequencing technologies with an aim of scaling up insect monitoring within the UK. In the Economo Lab, I am working as a research computational technician with a main task of helping our group members with their computing needs and managing the lab’s databases & websites.

I am an entomologist and evolutionary biologist interested in patterns of extinction and diversification in insects in deep time. The research areas I am most interested in include patterns and mechanisms of extinction in the fossil record, new methods for paleoecological reconstruction of extinct communities, and mechanisms and drivers of morphological stasis in deep time. The main goals of my research center on understanding extrinsic and intrinsic factors linked to large-scale dynamics of extinction and persistence.

My previous research focused on understanding extinction dynamics in ants during the Cretaceous as a function of their estimated ecologies, through the synthesis of fossil, phylogenetic, and morphological data. At OIST, I plan to continue synthesizing such lines of evidence and expand my research to assess a variety of drivers of extinction and diversification in the ant fossil record, including interspecific competition, environmental change, and assessing lineage responses to such pressures, to ultimately understand what factors underlie selective extinction patterns in insects.

I am an entomologist and ecologist generally interested in insects, plants, and their interactions, particularly ant-plants and myrmecophiles. I finished my undergraduate studies in organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard, conducting field research and wrote my thesis on the bottom-up effects of soil micronutrients on the African ant-acacia Vachellia drepanolobium and its obligate ant-inhabitants. For a year after college, I continued my research which included a 3-month field season in central Kenya and helped teach an entomology course at Harvard.

As an intern in the Arilab, I will be micro CT scanning some caterpillars and butterflies and investigating their morphology.