Caroline E. Farrior
Associate Professor, Department of Integrative Biology
University of Texas at Austin
office: 506A Patterson Laboratories
mailing address: 2415 Speedway Stop C0930, Austin Texas 78712
p: 1(512)-232-6922
People
Graduate Students
Damla Cinoglu
Damla is interested in plant community ecology with an emphasis on competitive and successional patterns. Damla studies how community composition can be predicted from plant functional traits and tradeoffs, and how they can predict ecosystem function.
Devin Grobert
Devin is interested in ecological interventions and related thresholds.
Charlotte Reemts
Charlotte is interested in applied fire and restoration ecology in grasslands, savannas, and forests. She works with land managers to test new techniques and track long-term management outcomes.
Xinyi Yan
Xinyi is interested in the impact of soil microbes on plant community. She is co-advised by Dr. Farrior and Dr. Wolf to study how plant-soil interactions mediate plant fitness and species coexistence.
Sun Yi Soh
Sun Yi is interested in forest community ecology and forest dynamics. He uses empirical data and modelling to investigate how tree life histories and demographic patterns contribute to forest structure.
Postdoctoral Researchers
Tom Bytnerowicz
Stengl-Wyer Postdoctoral Scholar
Tom is interested in feedbacks between nutrient limitation, forest growth, and climate. His research is aimed at elucidating the mechanisms that determine global patterns of symbiotic nitrogen fixation and using that mechanistic understanding to predict nitrogen fixing tree abundance and nitrogen fixation inputs across temporal and spatial scales.
Robin Decker
Robin is interested in theoretical spatial ecology, plant community ecology, and environmental change. She is exploring how fundamental, underlying tradeoffs in community interactions shape the dynamics of plant communities undergoing range shifts in response to climate change.
Ravi Ranjan
Ravi is interested in integrating physiology with population and community ecology to understand coexistence of primary producer communities and predict their responses to global change. At the Farrior lab, Ravi is working on a general model to explain the patterns of tree size distributions across both temperate and tropical forests.
Lab Alumni
Avery Dyson
Former: Undergraduate
As an undergrad, Avery used GIS and computational methods to investigate seedling dynamics and topographic heterogeneity in Panama. She developed her senior capstone research with the lab and continues to build upon this work. Avery is passionate about forest ecology, landscape ecology, and remote sensing.
Chase Rakowski
Ph.D. 2023
Chase is studying the effects of food web structure (predator diversity and intraguild predation) on the stability and functioning of pond ecosystems, using a combination of empirical and theoretical work. He is also interested in applying these ecological concepts to improving phytoplankton farming. He is co-advised by Mathew Leibold (University of Florida).
Dana Chadwick
Former Research Associate
Dana is interested in landscape biogeochemistry and ecosystem ecology, researching the interconnections among ecosystems, critical zone processes, and the evolution of landscapes.
Emily Francis
Former Postdoc
Current: Postdoc at the University of New Mexico
Emily is a remote-sensing ecologist interested in the impacts of climate change on the spatial patterns of tree diversity and forest carbon storage. She is studying how forest composition and structure respond to spatial and temporal variation in water availability, through the integration of airborne remote sensing and theoretical plant ecology.
Sarah Ortiz
Former: Undergraduate, Biology (EEB concentration)
Current: Graduate student, EEB Wolf Lab
Sarah worked on greenhouse experiments to test the stability of natural coexistence between herbaceous plants differing in functional group. Sarah is now a PhD student in EEB at UT Austin with Amy Wolf.
Shankari Subramaniam
M.A. 2019
Thesis title: Dispersal evolution in a community context.
Current: Data Scientist, Coupa Software
Alison Northup
Ph.D. 2021
Thesis title: Modern analyses of complex datasets in plant ecology and conservation
Haley Ross
Former: Undergraduate, Mechanical Engineering
Haley is working on a degree in mechanical engineering with a minor in Biology. Haley helps out in the lab in many ways and is beginning independent research.
Claire Fortunel
Former: Research Associate
Current: Research Scientist (Chargé de Recherche CR1)
The central goal of my research is understanding the mechanisms shaping plant diversity and the consequences for ecosystem functioning. I am particularly interested in testing how species differences shape their assembly in diverse communities. To address these mechanistic questions, I combine approaches from community ecology, functional ecology and phylogenetics.