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Buckle up for GSS 2026!


The 2026 Graduate Student Symposium (GSS) will take place January 30–31.

GSS is our annual event where graduate students showcase their amazing research. Presentations have ranged from proposed projects to published work, so no matter where you are in your program, we encourage you to participate! It’s a low-stakes, supportive space to gain presentation experience and receive constructive feedback.

As in past years, GSS will coincide with TREE, giving prospective students a chance to see the incredible research happening across the Odum community. GSS highlights to look forward to include: the undergraduate poster session, a keynote speaker, GSS merch, the John Spencer memorial run, and lots of free food! 

GSS is our flagship event here at Odum, and it’s run almost entirely by grad students. Please consider supporting the event by signing up for a committee, giving a talk, and/or attending as many presentations as you can!  

Students can sign up for committees here:  GSS 2026 Committee Signups. There are descriptions of the committees included in the sheet but feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions. 

 

GSS Co-Captain and Co-Co-Captain, 

Kylie Green and Nuzha Baksh

A Successful GSS 2024

This year’s GSS was a major success! This year, Odum hosted its largest Graduate Student Symposium in history, with a record number of both graduate student presenters (40) and undergraduate posters (28). To top it all off, there was a wonderful presentation by this year’s keynote speaker, an Altizer Lab alum, Dr. Cecilia Sánchez.

Big thanks to all who participated, visited, presented, and put in valuable time and effort to make such an event possible! Let’s make future GSS events live up to this one!

Bat Conservation International selects Anecia Gentles as a 2022 Student Scholar!

Congratulations, Anecia! As part of this scholarship, she will utilize a variety of field and laboratory methods to understand the ecology of Malagasy fruit bats. She will characterize viral dynamics of Malagasy fruit bats through antibody analysis of bat tissue types. She will determine seasonal resource use through isotope analysis of bat hair. Lastly, she will deploy GPS trackers on bats to delineate the extent of seasonal fruit bat overlap in home range.

You know nothing, John Snow.

Cholera affects an estimated 3 to 5 thousand people in Westeros each year. Its spatial distribution is largely characterized by sporadic outbreaks following the onset of Winter. The common dogma in Cholera epidemiology is that transmission spreads through water sources contaminated with the bacterium \textit{Vibrio cholerae}. However, we used species distribution modeling to demonstrate that the incidence of Cholera cases has no association with the distance to any water sources (Sunset Sea, Narrow Sea, Trident, or either Fork). Thus, the original insight gained from famous epidemiologist, John Snow, in the 1800’s is brought into question.

See full text at: http://mvevans89.github.io/docs/targaryen2018.pdf

Targaryen, Daenerys M.D (2018). You know nothing, John Snow. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Westeros, 12:1-3.

UPDATE: April fool!

Movin’ on up

This is the first post on our new domain. I was lazy, and just manually transferred the little content we had from the other page over. As such, I didn’t bring any of the old posts with me, so this is the first post. Hopefully having the official `ecology.uga.edu` address will help make this page more used.

Tad