People

• Nate B Hardy

  PI 2013-

  

  I study the evolutionary ecology of plant parasites, mostly insects that suck sap.

• Lilley Brookshite

  MS student 2025-

  

  Lilley is studying the phylogeny and invasion biology of aphids.

• Pryce Millikin

  PhD student 2025-

  

  Pryce is studying the phylogeny and invasion biology of aphids.

• Zimo Yang

  MS student 2023-

  

  Zimo studies how recombination rate variation affects adaptation in rugged fitness landscapes. He's also trying to make more useful models of herbivorous insect phenology.

• Stephen Tanzie

  PhD student 2022-

  

  Stephen is co-advised by Tonia Schwartz in Biology. In the Hardy Lab, he is using simulation models to generate hypotheses about how virulence affects the evolution of pathogenicity.

• Elise Woodruff

  MS student 2021-2023

  

  Elise mixed experiments and population genetic modeling to better understand the evolution of virulence in plant pathogens. Now she works as an ag inspector in Washington.

• Noah Bevers

  MS student 2019-2022

  

  Noah did data science to try and improve agricultural sustainability. He used machine learning to make it easier to diagnose foliar diseases, and hence reduce the use of synthetic pesticides. And he used meta-analysis to get a clearer view of the basis of virulence in plant pathogens. Noah is getting his PhD in precision agriculture at The Ohio State University

• Gwendolyn Bird

  PhD student 2017-2021

  

  Gwendolyn used comparative approaches to adress a variety of questions about herbivorous insect ecology and diversity.

• Chloe Kacksvinsky

  MS student 2017-2019

  

  Chloe did a comparative phylogenetic analysis of butterflies to test predictions about how their species diversity may have been driven by antagonistic co-evolution with their host plants. She also used target-enriched genome sequencing to get a better estimate of the Nearctic phid phylogeny. Chloe went on to a PhD at Oxford.

• Nicholas Christodoulides

  MS student 2014-2017

  

  Nick compared herbivorous insect transcriptomes to learn something about polyphagy. He went on to a PhD studying the evolutionary genetics of lizards at UCF. Now he's a bioinformatician at Carnegie Melon.

• Mayrolin Garcia Morales

  MS student 2014-2017

  

  Mayrolin developed a database of scale insect biodiversity called ScaleNet. And she tested some ideas about how natural enemies might drive species diversification in plant-eating insects (leafroller moths and scale insects). Mayrolin earned a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and went on to a PhD at UMass.

• Linda Oforka

  Visiting scholar 2017-

  

  While doing her PhD at the University of Lagos, in Nigeria, Linda spent six months in the lab to delimit species of black flies that transmit Onchocerciasis in West Africa. Since then, she has continued to research to improve public health in Africa.