Welcome

About

I am a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Smiley lab in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University. Broadly, I am interested in the spatiotemporal effects of climate and landscape on small mammal diet and body condition using stable isotopes. I aim to determine the underlying contribution of individual specialization to seasonal and intracentennial patterns of resource use at the population level.

Since beginning my graduate studies, I have conducting field work for my dissertation with the Environmental Protection Division at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. This project involves sampling scat and fur from small mammals (primarily, but not limited to Peromyscus leucopus) across habitat gradients, including disturbance history and dominant vegetation type, throughout the seasons.

Hailing from southeastern Connecticut, I completed my Bachelors of Science in Biological Sciences and Bachelors of Art in Art History, Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, from Union College in Schenectady, New York in 2020. My honors thesis, begun in the spring of 2019 and completed in the winter of 2020, applied stable isotope analysis to adult Ixodes scapularis bloodmeal as a method to identify the feeding guild or species of its nymphal host. Additionally, I investigated the temporal enrichment of carbon and nitrogen in the blood meal of black-legged ticks previously fed on Peromyscus leucopus hosts.

My passion for the history of art compliments my endeavors in ecology and spans a breadth of periods and movements: 18th through 21st century European art, Indian art, Edo printmaking, Italian Renaissance art, American art and architecture, and Latin American and Caribbean art. I have also researched the Raman spectra of red lake and indigo pigments.

Above, left to right: James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket (1875), Henri Matisse, Dance (I) (1909), and Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporu (1928).

Contact

Department of Ecology and Evolution
Stony Brook University
Life Sciences 633B
Stony Brook, NY 11794
imogene.welles@stonybrook.edu