People
Principal Investigator
Rebecca Terry
Associate Professor
Rebecca leads the Terry Lab at Oregon State University’s Department of Integrative Biology. Her research integrates the perspectives, tools, and data archives of biology and geology to understand how terrestrial communities — primarily small mammals in western North America — have responded to climate and land-use change across modern, historical, and paleontological timescales. She is particularly interested in the reliability of fossil and subfossil records as ecological proxies and in the factors that make species and communities more or less vulnerable to environmental change.
Postdoctoral Researchers
Sean Hixon
NSF EAR Postdoctoral Fellow
Sean combines isotope analysis and radiocarbon dating to study how specialist versus generalist small mammals responded to environmental changes in the Great Basin during the Holocene. His earlier research examined animal introductions and extinctions in Madagascar.
PhD Students
Alyssa Semerdjian
PhD Student
Alyssa examines the relationships between small mammal morphology and environmental change across multiple spatial and temporal scales. She earned her master's degree from Humboldt State University before joining the Terry Lab.
Jane Van Gunst
PhD Student
Jane focuses on pika conservation in the Great Basin, working in collaboration with Dr. Clint Epps' lab. She holds a B.S. in biology and French literature from the University of Virginia and an M.S. in landscape and forest ecology from the University of Nevada, Reno.
Phoebe Morris
PhD Student
Phoebe uses taphonomy and small mammal death assemblages to quantify taxonomic and functional diversity changes in response to anthropogenic impacts and climate change over millennial timescales.
Undergraduate Researchers
Joaquín Rico
Honors Undergraduate Researcher
Joaquín creates body size reconstructions from fragmentary packrat fossils to understand ecosystem organization and species responses to environmental change.
Lab Alumni
Postdoctoral Scholars
Graduate Students
