Sarah E. Diamond
Principal Investigator

(2018-present) Ecological Society of America Early Career Fellow 
(2017-present) George B. Mayer Assistant Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies
(2014-present) Assistant Professor, Case Western Reserve University
(2010-2013) Post-doctoral Research Associate, North Carolina State University
(2010) PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 
(2005) BS, Bucknell University

Sarah started doing research on the iconic goldenrod gallfly system in the lab of Dr. Warren Abrahamson at Bucknell University. Specifically, she explored host race formation in a small mordellid beetle, an inquiline of the goldenrod galls. After earning a bachelor of science degree from Bucknell, Sarah moved to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill for her PhD research in the lab of Dr. Joel Kingsolver. For her dissertation research, she explored the ecological and evolutionary forces that governed the use of a human-introduced novel host plant by the tobacco hornworm, Manduca sexta. During this research, she became very interested in how organisms responded to anthropogenic changes in the environment. For her post-doctoral research in the lab of Dr. Rob Dunn at North Carolina State University, she studied how forest ant communities responded to experimental climate warming, with a focus on thermal physiology. Now in her faculty position at Case Western Reserve University, Sarah uses a variety of arthropod systems (with a particular focus on ants and butterflies) to perform experiments and models of thermal physiology and organismal responses to global climate change and urban heat islands.  

Abe Perez
PhD Student

Abe is interested in how community structure and biodiversity are influenced by changing environments.

Aaron Yilmaz
​PhD Student

Aaron is interested in how arthropod thermal tolerance, desiccation tolerance, and body size vary geographically, and the evolutionary forces shaping these traits.

Angie Lenard
​PhD Student

Angie is interested in how butterflies cope with thermal challenges in urban environments.

Former Lab Members

Lacy D. Chick
Postdoc

Lacy was a postdoc in the lab (2015-2018). She is broadly interested in the links between thermal physiology and climate change. Lacy has a MS degree from Middle Tennessee State Univ. where she worked on latitudinal variation in locomotion of the northern water snake and a PhD from the Univ. of Tennessee where she worked on ant macrophysiology. She is currently an Instructor at Case Western Reserve University and post-doc at Holden Arboretum.

Stephanie A. Strickler
Research Associate

Stephanie was a research associate in the lab (2015-2017). She examined how species respond to urban environments, specifically focusing on the physiology and phenology of ants. She is now an Instructional Assistant Professor at Illinois State University.