People
Current lab members
Matt Schuler, PhD
Principal Investigator
I am an Assistant Professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey. As a community ecologist, the goal of my research group is to understand how anthropogenic factors alter ecological communities, given expected patterns of assembly, coexistence, and diversity from fundamental ecological theories. For the past few years, I have been investigating how anthropogenic stressors such as salinization, climate change, and invasive species affect freshwater environments. I also study how urban developments and environmental modifications such as roads alter the chemistry and distribution of species in ponds, lakes, and streams. This fall and winter I will be investigating if road salts increase the risk of heavy metal contamination in private drinking wells in New Jersey.
Email: schulerm@montclair.edu
Dean Bobo
Research Associate
I am currently a bioinformatician at the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the American Museum of Natural History. My current research includes estimating error rates of next-generation sequencing, tracking bacterial haplogroups in a ringtail lemur troops in Madagascar, determining how microbial communities change with freshwater salinization or pollution by human activity, and building gene annotation pipelines for use on non-model organisms. I build scalable and reusable pipelines to identify and QC genomic variants and annotations from high-throughput sequencing data on distributed computing systems. I trained at Ramapo College of New Jersey and Johns Hopkins University, and previously was a bioinformatician at the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Email: bobod@montclair.edu
Arif Ahmed
PhD Student
Kevin Peteroy
Graduate Student
I am a graduate student in the Master's program in Coastal and Marine Sciences at Montclair State University. I've wanted to be involved in biology since I was young. Previously, I've been involved in projects involving topics ranging from Horseshoe Crabs, pesticide analysis, Combined Sewer Overflow events, zooplankton collection, and seagrass habitat analysis. Currently, I'm particularly interested in the effects of anthropogenic inputs and alterations on the species and habitats present in a given space, such as in the case of nutrient pollution, habitat degradation, etc.
Yousef Dimian
Undergraduate Student
Thara Polanco-Diaz
Undergraduate Student
I am currently an undergraduate junior majoring in biology. When I first began attending university I intended to pursue a career within medicine. However, as I continued to progress throughout more science courses, I truly fell in love with biology. Today, I aim to pursue a master's degree in biology.
Jared Vigil
Undergraduate Student
I am currently an undergraduate at Montclair State University currently pursuing a degree in molecular biology. Ultimately, I would like to be a dentist but am glad to be exploring other opportunities that the biological field has to offer along the way. I love science and discovering all its mysteries, so I am happy to be a part of Dr. Schuler’s team and his effort to try and better understand our planet.