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Welcome to the University of Tennessee's Department of Microbiology

Welcome to the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

Our faculty is a mix of internationally known senior researchers and a energetic group of junior faculty at the cutting edges of their fields.

We train graduate and undergraduate students with research interests in ecology, evolutionary biology, animal behavior, conservation biology, behavioral and population genetics, plant biology, computational, mathematical and theoretical ecology, evolutionary theory, plant systematics, and other areas of organismal biology. Our strengths in these areas are complemented by collaborations with many other departments at UTK as well as the wide variety of scientists outside the university. Our adjunct faculty are found in the UTK departments of Biochemistry and Cell and Molecular Biology, Comparative Medicine, Earth and Planetary Sciences, Forestry, Wildlife & Fisheries, Geography, Mathematics, Microbiology, Nutrition, Plant and Soil Sciences, and Psychology. We also have adjunct faculty who work at the Environmental Sciences Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the US Geological Service, and the US National Park Service. We encourage collaborations within the department and beyond.

Department News

  • Jean-Phillipe Lessard, a second-year graduate student, received a three-year Postgraduate Scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Canada's equivalent of the US NSF).
  • Greg Crutsinger, a fourth-year graduate student, received a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from NSF for his project titled "The Community And Ecosystem Consequences Of Plant Genotypic Diversity."
  • Xuehua Cui received an outstanding student presentation award for her talk at the ASLO-AGU Ocean Sciences Meeting in Orlando. They were more than 4000 talks presented at the meeting and only 15 student presentations received awards. The title of her talk was "Effects of prey and environmental variation on spatial distribution and temporal variability of groundfish in the northern Bering Sea."