Principal Investigators
Dr. Stan Boutin
University of Alberta
My research investigates how resource availability affects maternal investment, development of offspring, and lifetime reproductive success in boreal mammals. I wish to determine how individual behavioral and life history responses to current conditions are shaped by past conditions and future trade-offs. For over 25 years my students and I have used field studies of individual red squirrels and experimental manipulation of their environment to investigate these questions.
Dr. Ben Dantzer
University of Michigan
My research focuses on questions that integrate animal behavior, physiology, and evolutionary ecology. I am interested in understanding the factors shaping the evolution of behavioral and life history traits as well as how physiological traits both mediate but also constrain variation in life history and behavioral traits. In red squirrels, I study the mechanisms and evolutionary consequences of early life experiences among other questions. I use a combination of long-term data coupled with large-scale experimental manipulations and laboratory analyses to address my research questions.
Dr. Jeff Lane
University of Saskatchewan
I’m interested in the ways in which individuals and populations respond to short- and long-term variation in their natural environments. I combine theory and techniques from ecology, evolutionary biology, quantitative genetics and physiology to meet this challenge, and primarily work with wild mammal populations that have been studied for multiple decades. Red squirrels are an ideal study system in this sense, because we can track individuals across their entire lives, scale our individual data up to population-level metrics and quantify their primary food resource (white spruce seed).
dr. april martinig
Université de Sherbrooke
April is an ecologist who asks nosy questions about why animals leave home - and what kind of trouble they get into when they do. Her research blends field grit, data science, and ecological theory to understand how individual quirks shape life’s big decisions. April’s specialty lies in making complicated models look cool and somehow distilling billions of movement points into something relatable all while mentoring students who don’t think they belong in science (but definitely do). She’s also a former varsity wrestler and current wrestling coach, which turns out to be excellent training for academia. Outside of academia, she applies the same obsessive energy to climbing, coaching wrestling, and curating a minimalist aesthetic that exists mostly in theory (if you don’t count books, climbing gear, and spreadsheets).
Dr. Andrew McAdam
University of Colorado
I am interested in the interactions between ecology and contemporary adaptation. I use long-term pedigrees and experimental manipulations of resources and relatedness to quantify key ecological and quantitative genetic parameters. The goal of these investigations is to understand how an organism’s unique ecology contributes to contemporary patterns of selection and evolution.
