Emails: (parentheses)@luc.edu

Principal Investigator
Yoel E. Stuart, PhD (ystuart)
Associate Professor
Curriculum Vitae (last updated 19 July 2024)

Postdoctoral Researchers

Jacopo N. Cerasoni (jcerasoni) 2022 – Present
Jacopo joined the lab in summer 2022 to work on the fossil stickleback project. He is an anthropologist by training, with a PhD from the Institute of Archaeological Sciences at the University of Tubingen and the Jena Max Planck Institute, both in Germany. He is collecting morphological data for our fossil stickleback project, and is developing an extensive paleoecological database from the same deposit, comprised of diatom and phytolith microfossil data. Website

Masters Students

Emmanuel Ezumel (eezumel) 2023-Present
Emmanuel is in the Biology program. He is interested in ecology and conservation biology and is studying Anolis lizard interactions and island metapopulation ecology in the Florida spoil island system. In particular, he is using hematology to test whether green anoles are more stressed on islands where brown anoles are present, relative to islands where greens are the only anoles. He is currently looking for a PhD lab.

Aaron Myrold (amyrold) 2023-Present. Aaron is in the Bioinformatics 4_1 BS/MS program. He is using simulations to understand the impacts of data reduction vs. data imputation on analyses of variance-covariance matrices.

Tristan Kosciuch (tkosciuch) 2020 – Present
Tristan is in the Bioinformatics program. He collected a stickleback data set from more than 40 lakes in summer 2020 to ask questions about landscape ecology and evolution by incorporating large-scale remote-sensed environmental data.

Megan O’Toole (motoole) 2023-2024. Megan is in the Chemistry 4+1 BS/MS program. She is collecting stable isotope data from diatomite sediments as part of the fossil stickleback project.

Katie Van Dame (kvandame) 2021 – 2024
Katie was in the Biology program. She is interested in processes that lead to diversification within and among populations. Her Masters is about the evolution of sexual dimorphism in threespine stickleback.

Bryan Galligan (bgalligan) 2020 – 2022
Bryan recently defended his thesis for his Masters in Philosophy. Congratulations, Bryan! He has past and ongoing interest in ecology and subsistence fishing. I am advising him as he pursues questions about larval recruitment and dispersal by quahog clams in Narragansett Bay, particularly as abiotic conditions like hypoxia change. He has moved to Kenya to work for the Jesuit Ecology Network Africa (JENA), where he is investigating social and scientific aspects of sustainable fisheries. He will stay on as a Lab Associate.

Technicians
Sidney Ryan 2023 – 2024
Sidney graduated from Loyola University Chicago and joined our lab as a fossil fish preparator for the fossil stickleback project. She has prepared and photographed thousands of fish fossils, and will be headed to the field in Summer 2024 to collect even more. Sidney starts a PhD program in the Department of Evolution Ecology and Organismal Biology at Ohio State University in Fall 2024.

Twyla Neely-Streit 2021 – 2022
Twyla is working on the nuclear Daphnia project. She has taken and sectioned cores in the field, prepared sediments for radioisotope dating, isolated ephippia for hatching experiments and run those experiments. She is now Education and Operations Associate for Illinois Green Alliance.

Franklin Joaquin 2020 – 2022
Franklin was our stickleback phenotyping expert, and main wrangler of undergraduate effort. He was also working to publish his own Lake Michigan stickleback data set collected when he was an undergraduate at DePaul with Windsor Aguirre. He is now a Teaching Laboratory Support Technician at University of Chicago.

Samantha Swank 2019 – 2021
Sam has started a PhD at University of Chicago, as of Fall 2021. Congrats Sam! While in the lab, she worked on a review of the genetic basis of vertebrate limb loss and collected and analyzed data for a project on the potential role of Pitx1 in squamate limb loss. Amongst many other things. She received an honorable mention for her NSF GRFP application to study aDNA in stickleback fish.

Undergraduate Researchers Undergrads drive research in the Stuart lab. They’ve been involved in nearly every project, and phenotyped thousands of threespined stickleback to boot.

Gannon Cottone (2019)

Raheyma Siddiqui (2019 – Present)

Clara Fix (2019 – 2021)

Allison Ozark (2019 – Present)

Ethan Elazegui (2019 – 2022)

Sophia Janidlo (2019 – 2022)

Ola Abughoush (2020)

Anu Chaudhary (2020)

Rebecca Sullivan (2020 – 2021)

Aaron Myrold (2020 – 2023)

Jason Tien (2020 – 2021)

Musharrat Islam (2020 – 2022)

Chauncey Lawson-Weinert (2020 – 2022)

Alyssa Chen (2020 – 2022)

Emily Ciolak (2020 – 2022)

Marielle Martin (2020 – 2023)

Edmond Haddad (2020 – 2023)

Jack Castro (2020 – 2021)

Daren Gause (2021)

Mark Marino (2021 – 2022)

Basem Altershan (2021 – 2022)

Maria Villanueva Guzman (2021 – 2022)

Imaan Maniya (2021 – 2022)

Megan O’Toole (2021 – 2023)

Sidney Ryan (2021 – 2023)

Kaith Garcia (2022 – Present)

Kara Ehler (2022 – 2023)

Christina Giudici (2022 – 2023)

Eric Delgado (2022 – 2024)

Hattie Kenknight (2023)

Owen Hejna (2023 – 2024)

Ian Hipp (2023 – 2024)

Iby Khan (2023 – Present)

Ebony Ikeemeka (2023 – Present)

Richa Patel (2022 – Present)

Ben Moginot (2023 – Present)

(Last Updated 19 July 2024)