photo by Kathryn Mercier
Carnaval Lab
Breaking molds in Biogeography
PhD Students
Caroline N. Flynn
Carol graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Ecology from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in 2019. She then started a MS in Ecology and Evolution at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) where she researched the genetic variation and structure in Hylodes fredi, a frog endemic to Ilha Grande, a continental island in southeast Brazil. While pursuing her masters she joined the Carnaval Lab as a visiting student with a CAPES PrInt Fellowship to work on her project for a few months. During her visit she fell in love with the city, the lab and the City
College campus.
In Fall 2022 Carol became a Biology PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center and is now an official Carnaval Lab member. She is interested in biodiversity and ecosystem conservation, evolutionary restoration ecology, and climate change mitigation/adaptation.
Rilquer Mascarenhas
rilquermascarenhas@gmail.com
Rilquer graduated with a BS in Biology from Universidade Federal da Bahia in Salvador, Brazil, where he studied the phylogeography of the Grey-hooded flycatcher, an endemic passerine of the Atlantic Forest of Brazil. During his master’s thesis, he focused on microevolutionary processes underlying the genomic adaptation of passerines to urban environment, specifically addressing behavioral adaptations to communication in noisy habitats.
He is currently interested in investigating how ecological differences across species mediate their responses to environmental changes and affect patterns of genetic diversity. During his PhD, his goals are to integrate empirical genomic evaluation along with genetic simulation approaches to better understand the relative importance of neutral and ecological drivers of phylogeographic patterns in the community.
Kathryn Mercier
Kathryn graduated from the University of Central Florida with a MS in Biology working in Dr. Christopher Parkinson's lab. Her thesis was on the phylogeography of mole skinks with an emphasis on their conservation. During her time at UCF she also worked on evaluating the utility of remote sensing to track sea turtle nesting as well as the population genetics of eastern oysters in Apalachicola Bay, FL.
Generally, Kathryn is interested in understanding the drivers of biodiversity at a variety of levels. Specifically, she would like to develop a project understanding how past climate change has shaped patterns of diversity and use that information to make predictions of how biodiversity will shift in the future. She is also interested in working with managers to best protect biodiversity. Kathryn started her PhD in the Carnaval Lab in 2018, and was awarded the Levine Fellowship from the City College of New York.
Connor French
Connor graduated with a BS in Biology (Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior; 2015) from the University of Texas at Austin where he studied the evolution of color in female three-spine stickleback and hung out at the natural history collections a little too much. He then pursued a Master of Science in Zoology at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale under Dr. Jason Brown’s advisorship. He studied the speciation and phylogeography of an Ameerega poison frog species pair in Peru. While in Carbondale, he ill-advisedly joined two bands, which made writing his thesis more stressful than it should have been.
He joined the Carnaval and Hickerson Labs in Fall 2018. Having arrived in the Big Apple, he is now interested in the big biodiversity questions. He wants to integrate population genetics and community ecological theory to investigate the processes behind community assembly and biogeographic history. Now a mature PhD student, he will hopefully maintain some self-control and only play in one band.