Participating Mentors

The GEO REU takes advantage of the faculty from the OEB and HEB Departments. OEB and HEB present a fantastic opportunity for students to explore the breadth of evolution and ecology. OEB also includes a diverse group of affiliated institutions, including the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), Harvard Univ. Herbarium (HUH), Harvard Forest (HF) and Arnold Arboretum (AA), which hold some of the finest and largest collections of natural history objects and living woody plants in the world. Many of our faculty are also members of HUCE, which seeks to raise the quality of environmental research and education at Harvard while fostering linkages and partnerships amongst different parts of the University, as well as between the University and the outside world.

Host faculty members are just one of several mentoring relationships participants will experience in the GEO program. Participants will also have a direct research mentor in their host lab, such as a postdoc or graduate student; a peer mentor drawn from outside their lab, who will be an OEB graduate student; and a community of peer interns with whom participants will participate in diverse professional and personal development opportunities.

GEO mentors are drawn from across OEB and HEB. Below is a sampling of faculty who have mentored GEO REU interns in past years:

Dr. Ben de Bivort (OEB) – The de Bivort lab studies the biological basis of behavioral biases in Drosophila.
Dr. Terry Capellini (HEB) – The Capellini lab uses genetic and genomic approaches to investigate the evolution of skeletal development in vertebrates, with an emphasis on primates.
Dr. Rachel Carmody (HEB) – Our lab seeks to understand how the human body acquires and utilizes energy, and how past changes in energy budget have shaped human evolution.
Dr. Andrew Davies (OEB) – The Davies lab examines how animals interact with the environment and each other to affect ecosystem processes at landscape scales.
Dr. Charles Davis (OEB/HUH/HUCE)We study plant diversity by integrating the disciplines of systematics, paleobiology, evolution, ecology, and molecular biology.
Dr. Scott Edwards (OEB/MCZ/HUCE)We use birds as model organisms to study patterns of speciation, biogeography, evolution of the genome, and the process of adaptation.
Dr. Cassandra Extavour (OEB) Our shared interest is the evolution of the genetic mechanisms employed during early animal embryogenesis to specify cell fate, development and differentiation.
Dr. Peter Girguis (OEB/HUCE) – The Girguis lab is interested in the physiology and biochemistry of deep sea organisms, from microbes to animals, with an emphasis on the role they play in carbon and nitrogen biogeochemical cycles.
Dr. Gonzalo Giribet (OEB/MCZ/HUCE) –The Giribet lab uses genomic, transcriptomic, and morphological data from living and extinct animals to better understand invertebrate evolution.
Dr. Erin Hecht (HEB) – The Hecht lab’s research asks how brains change in response to selection pressure on behavior, and how brains acquire heritable adaptations for complex, learned behaviors.
Dr. Noel Holbrook (OEB/HF/HUCE) – The Holbrook lab is interested in the physics and physiology of vascular transport in plants with the goal of understanding how constraints on the movement of water and solutes between soil and leaves influences ecological and evolutionary processes.
Dr. Elena Kramer (OEB) – The Kramer lab is interested in the evolution of genetic programs controlling plant development, particularly in flowers.
Dr. Jim Mallet (OEB) – The Mallet group studies evolution, hybridization, and speciation, mostly in South American butterflies.
Dr. Mansi Srivastava (OEB) – The Srivastava lab takes an integrative approach to studying wound response and stem cell biology during regeneration of invertebrates.

Visit this page to see some example projects that are available in the summer of 2024.