Sustainability Leadership Fellowship Cohort: 2014-2015

Ph.D Candidate, Department of Biology

Research Summary: Brian is an evolutionary ecologist interested in understanding species vulnerability to rapid global climate change. He has specific expertise in the systematics of mountain stream insects and enjoy working internationally, particularly in the new world tropics. For his doctoral dissertation, he is working with a large team of North American and Ecuadorian researchers to test the distributional predictions of the Climate Variability Hypothesis and the Mountain Passes are Higher in the Tropics Hypothesis by comparing elevational distributions of stream insects in the Colorado Rocky Mountains and the Ecuadorian Andes. Brian and his team hopes to determine if there are differences in stream species vulnerability to rapid global climate change associated with latitude.