Kelly Speer

Research

In addition to plants and animals, the trillions of microscopic interactions that occur in the environment or in association with a host also play an important role in structuring communities. My lab studies the interactions between hosts, parasites, and microorganisms to assess the response of complex wildlife communities to stressors like climate change, habitat loss, and novel disease emergence. We approach this research through the lenses of evolutionary ecology and comparative biology, using genomic sequencing technologies and cutting-edge analytical techniques (e.g., ecological networks, machine learning) to study natural history specimens and field-based systems. This work focuses on bats and their blood-feeding ectoparasites, but there are lots of opportunities for working on other taxa.

Affiliations

• Michigan Center for Infectious Disease Threats
• Museum of Zoology

Fields of Study

• Evolutionary Ecology
• Host-parasite & Host-pathogen Interactions
• Microbial Ecology
• Natural History Collections