School of Biology and Ecology

Six faculty members in SBE (Karen Pelletreau, Farahad Dastoor, Hamish Greig, Robert Northington, Brian Olsen, and Michelle Smith) are co-authors on a recent publication about teaching the Central Dogma, which is a core concept of biology. The UMaine faculty led a collaboration with faculty from the University of Georgia, University of Colorado-Boulder, University of South […]

The Ellen Keough Hodosh, PhD, Graduate Fellowship Fund was established in 2016 in the University of Maine Foundation for the benefit of the University of Maine, Orono, Maine, with a gift from Ralph J. Hodosh in loving memory of his wife, Ellen Keough Hodosh. Ralph and Ellen were first generation college students, met at the […]

Noelle Leon-Palmer, a recent School of Biology and Ecology graduate, was interviewed for a feature in UMaine Today. Noelle discusses her honors thesis about the physiology, neurobiology, and endocrinology of love, playing on the University of Maine women’s soccer team, and her upcoming position as an honors associate in the Honors College. Click here to […]

The Drummond lab is profiled in this UMaine Today feature, including discussions about Dr. Frank Drummond’s decades of bee research, colony collapse disorder, and current ongoing research by the many students and technicians involved with the lab. Click here to read the full feature at UMaine Today.    

Research from Dr. Brian Olsen’s lab, in conjunction with the Saltmarsh Habitat & Avian Research Program (SHARP), shows that the saltmarsh sparrow population in Maine has decreased nearly 11 percent annually since 1998. The AP version of the article was distributed by ABC News, the Washington Post, and many others. Click here to read details […]

Catherine (Kit) Hamley, a graduate student under School of Biology and Ecology professor, Jacquelyn Gill, has been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to continue her research in Quaternary studies while pursuing a doctorate degree through the Ecology and Environmental Sciences Program. Hamley’s work to date has focused on the Falkland Islands where […]

School of Biology and Ecology student, Elizabeth Wood of Catlett, Virginia, has been named the Outstanding Graduating Student in the College of Natural Sciences, Forestry, and Agriculture at the University of Maine. Wood is an honors student majoring in biology with a pre-med concentration, and a minor in chemistry. She is a member of UMaine’s […]

SBE Academic Awards Highest GPA in a major within the School First Year Katherine Evans Lucia Guarnieri Emily Gagne Sophomore Jackson Foley Callie Greco Jacqueline Lambert Junior Sigrid Koizar Kaitlin Clark Haley Netherton Senior Elizabeth Wood Erik Holmsen School of Biology & Ecology Academic Achievement Award Awarded to the graduating senior having the highest GPA […]

Hamish Greig has received a Maine Sea Grant to study Atlantic Salmon. Click here to read the full story. Maine Sea Grant awards funds for three UMaine research projects  

Chris Baker, a postdoc from the Jackson Laboratory, and Michelle Smith, and assistant professor in the School of Biology and Ecology and member of the Maine Center for Research in STEM Education, were awarded a PALM fellowship from the Genetics Society of America. This is the first year the PALM fellowship has been awarded, and […]

   Living in one place, studying one central ecosystem, working with a species that can be explained in one sentence…these things, among many others, will likely never play a role in Danielle Levesque’s research in the mammalian world. Ever since discovering in her undergraduate years that she did not need to be a vet to […]

We will meet: This & Every Thursday @ 11:00 – 12:15 in centrally located  101 Norman Smith Hall Intended for students, faculty, and staff! This spring, faculty from Biology & Ecology, Economics, and Wildlife Ecology will again offer a weekly discussion group open to all who are interested.  Largely the group will cover three themes across both non-human and human systems: […]

Dr. Michael Kinnison and School of Biology and Ecology graduate student, Nikko Shaidani, are featured in UMaine Today for their work on red-backed salamanders. They discuss how the mainland species came to be abundant residents of almost all the Maine coastal islands and how genetic testing offers clues to their evolutionary history and diversity. https://umainetoday.umaine.edu/archives/fallwinter-2015/mysterious-islanders/ […]

Dr. Jacquelyn Gill talks about climate change, the impact of large mammals on ecosystems, and the de-extinction of the woolly mammoths in this UMaine Today feature. https://umainetoday.umaine.edu/archives/fallwinter-2015/thinking-big/  

Kristy Townsend’s scientific roots reach back to her undergraduate years at the University of Maine. “Some of the most important and formative scientific experiences in my life were when I was mentored as a young scientist and was able to work alongside faculty on novel research projects,” says Townsend, whose undergraduate research included collaboration with […]

Dr. Rebecca Holberton talks about declining migration numbers of songbirds in this UMaine Today article. Holberton: Birds of a feather don’t always migrate together  

Orono, Maine — Andrew Galimberti, an entomology graduate student at the University of Maine, was part of a research team that discovered that bigger isn’t necessarily better for a fish during an extinction event. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and UMaine found that for at least 40 million years following the last massive extinction, […]

The extinction of mammoths, ground sloths and other large plant-eaters thousands of years ago triggered shifts in global habitats and changes in ecosystems, says University of Maine paleoecologist Jacquelyn Gill. The assistant professor in the School of Biology and Ecology and the Climate Change Institute says fossils and other records from the deep past provide […]