Title: "Using thermal physiology to explain patterns of biodiversity and response to climate change"
Abstract: Climate variability shapes the thermal tolerance of ectotherms and therefore determines their distributions, abundances, and vulnerability to climate change. However, the mechanisms by which temperature affects ectotherms, from genes to communities, are poorly understood. Here, I will talk about using insects as models to test hypotheses about links between climate, physiology, genetic architecture, and community dynamics with the goal of understanding and predicting species response to change.
Bio: Alisha Shah is an evolutionary ecologist based at Michigan State University’s Kellogg Biological Station. She received her PhD at Colorado State University in 2018 and was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Montana, Missoula for 2 years before starting as an Assistant Professor at KBS in 2022. Her current research focuses on the challenge of understanding how species and communities will respond to climate change. Shah and her lab group address this challenge using ecological, physiological, and genomic approaches in the field and the lab. While their research questions apply to a broad spectrum of organisms, they focus most of their efforts on aquatic insects.
