Susan S. Kilham Collegiate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies
she/her
About
Academic Background
I received my B.S. in Biological Sciences from Cornell University in 2000. After a brief stint working as a field technician in Antarctica, I moved to the Kellogg Biological Station and Michigan State University for graduate school. I received my Ph.D. in Zoology and Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and Behavior from MSU in 2006. From there, I moved to the University of Wisconsin for my postdoctoral research, which was supported by an NSF postdoctoral fellowship in biological informatics. From 2008-2012, I was an assistant professor in the School of Biology at Georgia Tech. I joined the EEB faculty in August 2012.
Research Interests
General Overview:
Research in the Duffy Lab aims to understand the causes and consequences of symbioses in freshwater plankton, recognizing that host-symbiont interactions are dynamic. Our research combines field observational studies and experiments, experiments in the lab, molecular analyses, and mathematical modeling to understand the drivers of host-symbiont interactions, and to understand the impacts of symbioses on individuals, populations, communities, and ecosystems.
Specific Areas of Current Research:
1) Multihost-multisymbiont interactions: most host species harbor an array of symbionts, including a diversity of parasites. At the same time, most parasites can infect multiple host species. These more complex communities of hosts and symbionts have important consequences for the ecology and evolution of symbiosis, but studies often focus on just a single host and symbiont. Some of the current areas of focus within this research theme are: a) understanding how symbionts interact within hosts, b) understanding how within host interactions between parasites scale up to the community level, c) understanding the tradeoffs faced by symbionts that infect multiple host species, and d) understanding why some symbionts are restricted to a single host type while close relatives traverse vast phylogenetic distances.
2) Shifts along a mutualism-parasitism gradient: traditionally, ecologists viewed a particular host-symbiont interaction as fixed – always parasitism or commensalism or mutualism. While we now realize that the nature of interactions can shift over time, we have relatively few well understood examples of shifts along the mutualism to parasitism continuum, especially for interactions that are typically parasitic but that sometimes shift to mutualism. We have developed a new Daphnia-microsporidian system that we are using to understand the causes and consequences of shifts along the mutualism-parasitism continuum.
3) Understanding the drivers and impacts of the spatiotemporal distribution of free-living stages of symbionts: Many symbionts must spend time outside their hosts, in environments that are very different from (and often more variable than) the within host environment. We are interested in understanding the spatial and temporal variation in the distribution of free-living stages of symbionts, the factors impacting their distribution, and the impacts of different aspects of the environment (e.g., light environments) on symbiont fitness.
4) Interactions between food web members and symbionts: A long-standing research interest in our group is in the ways other food web members influence the outcomes of host-symbiont interactions. This work has particularly focused on the roles of predators and the role of resources on host-parasite interactions.
5) Rapid evolution in host-parasite interactions: Another long-standing interest in our group is rapid evolution of hosts and parasites during disease outbreaks. More recently, we’ve also worked to understand how genetic changes in a population during one outbreak translate into the next growing season.
Teaching
Bio 171: Introductory Biology
BIO 120: First Year Seminar: Ecological and Evolutionary Medicine
EEB 315: Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases
EEB 458: Population and Community Ecology
Research Areas
- Evolutionary ecology, disease ecology, host-parasite interactions, freshwater ecology
Field(s) of Study
- Evolutionary ecology, disease ecology, host-parasite interactions, freshwater ecology
Graduate Students
- Libby Davenport, Cheyenne Graham (co-advised with Kelly Speer), Riley Manuel, Teresa Sauer, Aleana Savage (co-advised with Kelly Speer), Angela Zhu
Postdoctoral Fellow
Lab Technician
- Natalia Ferreira dos Santos
Lab Manager
