Staff Profiles
Being a 25+ year employee at UT has allowed me to experience several academic units. In all of the departments, it has been a pleasure to work with students and faculty from different regions of the world. The EEB department, however, has been a constant advocate for adding and bringing more diversity to the department, which has resulted in recruitment of some very intelligent (and active) faculty and students. Overall, a great department to be a part of!”
Marva Anderson, Business Manager
“Having worked in higher education for most of my career, I knew that UT has a wonderful reputation for research and education and employees rank the university as one of the best places to work in the state. It is the place I wanted to ‘hang my hat.’
Within our department, there is a variety of collections such as fish and fungi and the greenhouses have a variety of plant species to explore. You can’t get bored with this variety. The 18-acre Biology Field Station, near Gatlinburg, hosts organizations from all over who come for field courses, teaching and research. I learn something every day about the university and hope to continue learning while I have the opportunity to work here.”
Christy Fulscher, Account Specialist II
“I had worked at the university for 22 years, but never in an academic department before given the opportunity to work in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary. I knew this would push me mentally and to continue to learn the other side of how the university functions.
“Working in EEB these past nine years have been fun. The office is small, which makes it easier for communication. The office staff is great and I enjoy the interaction with the grad students and the professors. I think we have a great group of professionals working together in EEB. People may not know that the department has a variety of ‘critters’ like spiders and lizards, but also birds. We also have an amazing fish and herbarium collections.”
Janice Harper, Graduate Secretary/Administrative Specialist III
“Getting a job at the university was something I very much wanted to do. I was fortunate enough that my wealth of experience allowed me the opportunity to obtain a job at UT in the EEB department. I think it is wonderful seeing such a diverse group of people working in our office and in our department. I have been made to feel very welcome here at UT, which is one of the many reasons I chose to work for UT and EEB specifically.
“I think perhaps a lot of people do not know that we have a wonderful summer program for kids with our Kids U Summer camp at UT. My children would have loved to attended something like this when they were younger. Our EEB department is ranked in the top 10% in North America for our research ahead of places such as UCLA and UC San Diego. This allows us to retain a wonderful array of professors and graduate students that work within our department. Our greenhouses are quite amazing, with the recent bloom of the corpse flower being a truly amazing event that was published in many news sources.”
Kassi Shepard, Undergraduate Coordinator
It’s got the largest cluster of flowers—sometimes more than eight feet tall—of any plant in the world. It doesn’t flower often—maybe once every seven to 10 years. And when it does decide to flower, it emits a foul smell like the rotting body of an animal. 
Tomatoes are the heart of many backyard gardens. Tomato crops are also an important economic revenue in North America. The vegetable we all know as the “T” of a great summer BLT, however, may be in jeopardy due to a decline in its pollinator species because of climate change.
For decades, scientists have worked to understand the intricacies of biological diversity – from genetic and species diversity to ecological diversity.
Katherine Whitaker graduated magna cum laude in May 2021 as a biology major, concentrating in ecology and evolutionary biology. Katie excelled in both her course work at UK and as a successful undergraduate researcher. 
Kayci Messerly graduated from EEB in May 2021 with a minor in statistics. She completed a research study in the Derryberry lab on heat stress effects on the behavior of zebra finches in collaboration with graduate student Casey Coomes. Her hundreds of hours scoring behavioral videos paid off with presentations at two national conferences, The Animal Behavior Society and the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. 
Members of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology recognize and are proud of the long history of programs for conservation of natural resources and the promotion of human welfare that Tom Gilbert (BA ‘50, MS ‘52) has envisioned and led throughout much of the world. 
In 2020, EEB underwent a ten-year Academic Program Review to evaluate the entire program including our culture, and all aspects of the research and teaching missions of the department. The review committee (with folks from inside and outside of the university) noted that one of the “strongest cultural aspects of the department are its collegiality and collaborative spirit that infuses all they do.” 
During this past unusual year we have drawn on this collaborative spirit to help support one another and our students in many ways. With over a year of largely online learning, faculty and staff have helped each other navigate online teaching by sharing digital expertise, sharing slides and teaching materials, and supporting each other by checking in to see how everyone is doing. We have worked hard to support our students through creative methodologies for courses that may have normally been taught in person in the field or lab, by keeping in contact through virtual meetings and social events and increased communication and sharing of health, mental health and career resources. The excellence of our staff members have kept the main office productive and helpful, have maintained our research and teaching resources and collections and have found new and creative ways to support the department. Graduate students pivoted to teach online while also still figuring out ways to do research safely during a pandemic. Moreover, a motivated diversity committee has worked hard to educate and talk about critical social issues through a virtual diversity reading group to change and improve our understanding as well as create action plans to improve diversity and create a culture of true inclusion and safety within our community. 
While distancing, learning, and working in sometimes very challenging conditions in our homes, EEB has continued to be the collegial and productive department that was noted in our program review. We have graduated more than 45 undergraduate and graduate students over the last year, offered professional development and training for students and have taught all of our normally scheduled courses – even if the format was greatly modified – to prevent bottlenecks that might limit student success. 
Our research mission has continued and expanded with faculty and students working on reviews, new virtual collaborations, backyard experiments, and many other creative ways to create and apply knowledge in ecology and evolutionary biology. This year EEB students and faculty have 68 active grants from multiple agencies totaling more than $6 million (Professors Budke and Sheldon both won prestigious NSF CAREER awards), fellowships (Maryrose Weatherton won a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship), and national and local awards (Amanda Hyman won the Cheek Graduate Student Medal of Excellence, Professor Derryberry won Professional Promise in Research & Creative Achievement awards). The list is too long to include here, but we include here a list of all the award winners in the 2020-21 academic year. Our faculty and students have continued to publish important and high-profile papers. 
Laura Russo
For example, activity bags were built as a collaboration between Biology in a Box, McClung Museum, the Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) and Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS) for Darwin Day 2021. Previously, in-person activities were organized for a family fair on Darwin Day. The challenge in 2020 was to create an activity for kids that could be done at home. McClung Museum organized the concept and layouts while EEB and EPS faculty created the content. 
More than 120 Darwin Day activity bags were distributed through the local Boys & Girls club, which included students enrolled from Inskip Recreation Center, Norwood Elementary, and Deane Hill Center. Similar activity bags will be distributed through two local schools as an ongoing collaboration between McClung Museum and Biology in a Box. 
Kimberly Sheldon, an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB), was awarded a highly-competitive Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The award is NSF’s most prestigious recognition for early-career faculty members and recognizes individuals “who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.”
Insects might compensate for temperature increases by shifting their behavior to use cooler microclimates within their environment. Sheldon’s research team will spend the next five years investigating how dung beetles in Tennessee and Ecuador respond to warmer and more variable temperatures and how that behavior impacts their offspring’s development and survival.
Jessica Budke, an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) and director of the 
Using field-collected plants and natural history specimens, Budke will use an innovative and integrated research approach that incorporates comparative analysis of function morphology, physiology, and evolution to explore and understand the processes that have led to diverse adaptations for regulating parental-offspring resource allocation across species.
Budke and her students will use the experiences and data from the course to build educational modules and activities for UT programs at natural history museums and local public botanical gardens. They will host sessions about mosses and specimen research for students grades 3-12 and will build an educational module for the UT Biology in a Box program to engage kids with natural history collections and moss biology.