Welcome to The Department of Biological Sciences!

front row: Jeffrey A. Sands, Ph.D., Chair; Linda Lowe-Krentz, Ph.D., Assoc. Chair back row: Vassie C. Ware, Ph.D., Infrastructure Committee Chair; Murray Itzkowitz, Ph.D., Graduate Committee Chair

The department consists of a lot of people: faculty, administrative staff, technical staff, and graduate research/teaching assistants. One strong thing bonding us together is that we are working hard at things we really like, advanced biological education and research.

There is a lot to see on this website, so look around. You can get a very good overview of our research endeavors by visiting the web pages of the individual faculty members and their research labs. If you are a current or prospective undergraduate student, you will find detailed descriptions of our various majors, information about our courses and undergraduate research, and links to interdisciplinary opportunities. If you are looking around for opportunities at the graduate level, peruse the pages describing our doctoral programs in molecular cell biology, biochemistry, and integrative biology and neuroscience, or our highly focused master's program in molecular biology that is exclusively by distance.

If you have questions about any aspects of our department, feel free to e-mail me or the associate chair, any other faculty member or post-doctoral scientist, or any member of our administrative or technical staff. Anyone will be glad to answer your questions or put you in touch with someone who can.

On behalf of the entire department,

Jeffrey A. Sands
Professor and Chairman

Abigail Pattishall

Abigail Pattishall is a fifth year graduate student in the Integrative Biology program and works in the laboratory of Dr. David Cundall. She is interested in the ecological and behavioral factors that allow animal populations to survive and/or thrive in urban environments. The deleterious effects of urbanization on wildlife are very well documented, but some populations manage to persist, or even find increased success, in developed areas. Animals that live in environments dominated by humans must deal with increased human contact, roads, habitat fragmentation and modification, pollution, unnatural distribution of food resources, etc. In general, successful urban animals exhibit wide ecological amplitudes, tolerance to disturbance, and flexibility in their behavior and habitat use. Explicit studies of urbanization and its effects on wildlife are rare, but of increasing importance given the rapid spread of anthropogenic disturbance.
 
Much of her research to date has been conducted on the northern watersnake (Nerodia sipedon), a medium-sized, non-venomous, semi-aquatic snake common throughout much of the eastern United States. She has been radio-tracking watersnakes in an effort to understand how snakes living in urban and natural areas differ in their spatial biology and habitat use. Because snakes are such cryptic animals little is known about their behavior compared to what is known about more charismatic, endothermic animals. Observing snakes in the field has allowed her to generate several new questions about the ultimate and/or proximate causes of, and the mechanisms responsible for, several behavioral phenomena. She has begun, and plans to continue, laboratory experiments designed to investigate social behavior, learning and memory, and the mechanisms snakes might use to navigate through their environment.

Site maintained by Maria Brace
Department of Biological Sciences
Lehigh University
©2007