Research opportunities and independent research courses
Faculty accepting undergraduate researchers
Please feel free to reach out to these faculty members directly via email. It's the best way to start the process.
- Gina Baucom - ecological genetics/genomics and evolution, plant biology, evolutionary ecology, agriculture
- Gideon Bradburd - Spatial population genetics, computational/statistical genomics, coevolution, statistical inference
- Liliana Cortés Ortiz - use of molecular and morphological analyses to address questions related to primate diversity and evolution
- Vincent Denef - molecular analysis of bacterial communities to determine impacts of species invasions on community composition, physiology, functional traits, and evolutionary processes
- Thomas Duda - molecular and/or morphological studies of molluscs to address questions concerning their ecology and evolutionary history
- Meghan Duffy - evolutionary ecology, disease ecology, host-parasite interactions, freshwater ecology
- Melissa Duhaime - microbial and viral ecology and genomics in ocean and Great Lakes systems: viruses of harmful algal blooms, the role of nutrient limitation in viral infections, microbes living on plastic debris; the study of plastic debris in aquatic habitats
- Timothy James - evolution of fungi, mating systems, phylogenetics
- L. Lacey Knowles - projects that use genetic tools to test how current and past landscape features, as well as climatic changes, impact species divergence and biodiversity patterns
- Hernán López-Fernández - tropical freshwater fishes, systematics, macroevolution, evolutionary ecology, conservation
- Yin-Long Qiu - undergraduate students will have an opportunity to work closely with a professor on exciting and important problems in plant evolutionary biology
- Nate Sanders - community ecology, macroecology, global change ecology
- Tom Schmidt - ecology, evolution and engineering of the human gut microbiome
- Stephen Smith - biogeography of plants, bioinformatics related to phylogenetics, and genomics and phylogenetics
- Cody Thompson - evolutionary patterns and processes of mammalian diversity
- Elizabeth Tibbetts - multiple aspects of animal behavior, including mate choice, cognition, parental care, and communication
- María Natalia Umaña - investigate above and belowground plant strategies at the U-M Big Woods forest plot. Students have the opportunity to 1) collect leaf and root trait for different plant species. 2) collect soil samples to determine nutrient and soil water content and 3) manage and analyze the collected data
- Thais Vasconcelos - Plant biogeography, systematics, and trait evolution; plant-animal interactions; natural history collections
Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP)
UROP creates research partnerships between first and second year students and University of Michigan faculty. All schools and colleges of the University of Michigan are active participants in UROP, thereby providing a wealth of research topics from which a student can choose. Begun in 1989 with 14 student/faculty partnerships the program continues to grow, offering more first and second year students the opportunity to be part of an exciting research community. Today, approximately 1300 students and over 800 faculty researchers are engaged in research partnerships.
NEW! Green Life Sciences at U-M
Green life forms – plants, algae, and microbes – are integral components of the earth biosystem, and are essential to human existence. From the dawn of civilization, they have been subjects of human intellectual inquiry for practical, artistic and spiritual needs. With the rapid development of interdisciplinarity in sciences over the last half century, botany, the science that studies green life forms, has metamorphosized into green life science, with several specialized sub-disciplines.The U-M Green Life Science Initiative aims to integrate green life sciences on campus, which investigate forms, functions, genetics, ecology and evolution of green life forms.
Conference travel award for undergraduate researchers in EEB
Undergraduates conducting research in the laboratories of EEB faculty members may apply for a one-time grant of up to $250 for travel to a conference at which the student presents a paper or a poster.
