People | Terry Lab

Current Lab Members

Rebecca Terry

Associate Professor

email: terryr@oregonstate.edu

phone: 541-737-3723

Sean Hixon

NSF EAR Postdoctoral Fellow

email: hixons@oregonstate.edu

Research Focus:

Sean is a postdoctoral fellow in the Terry Lab. He completed his PhD at UC Santa Barbara in 2021 and a Marie Curie Fellowship in Jena, Germany in 2024. He is currently working to combine taxon-specific stable isotope and AMS 14C chronologies with existing paleoenvironmental proxies to characterize the divergent responses of specialist and generalist small mammals in the Great Basin to eradication in the Holocene. Prior to coming to OSU, his research has focused on Madagascar, and using chemical analyses of bones, plants, and lake sediments to help infer potential causes and consequences of intentional animal introductions and subsequent extinctions of native fauna during the past ~2,000 years. In his free time, he enjoys racquetball, mountain biking, and collecting rocks and minerals.

Alyssa Semerdjian

PhD Student

email: semerdja@oregonstate.edu

Website

Research Focus:

My research questions concern the ties between small mammal morphology and environmental change. I want to know, in broad terms, whether there are taxonomic, habitat, or behavioral traits that determine the strength of morphometric adaptation in response to climate change. I am using small mammal specimens to answer these questions across a range of spatial and temporal scales.

Jane Van Gunst

PhD Student

email: vangunsk@oregonstate.edu

Research Focus:

Jane received her undergraduate degrees in biology and French literature and language from

University of Virginia. While working at a foundation promoting wildlife conservation in the

Intermountain West, Jane became involved in applied ecology and restoration ecology projects in Great

Basin sagebrush and woodland systems. She returned to the University of Reno, Nevada to complete her

MS degree in landscape and forest ecology in the Great Basin Landscape Ecology Lab. After working as a

nongame biologist for a state wildlife agency, she started a PhD program in September 2022, working

with Dr. Rebecca Terry’s lab in the Department of Integrative Biology and Dr. Clint Epps’ lab in the

Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences at Oregon State University. Her current

research focuses on advancing pika conservation in arid systems, particularly in the Great Basin.

Phoebe Morris

PhD Student

email: morrisph@oregonstate.edu

Research Focus:

I research conservation-focused taphonomy and paleobiology in terrestrial systems using small mammals as indicators of broader ecological changes. My goal is to use taphonomic methods to quantify changes in both taxonomic and functional diversity in the Great Basin, analyzing rodent death assemblages found in caves that also contain records of human activity at the end of the Holocene. Contrary to the common belief that anthropogenic impacts to ecosystems began with the Industrial Revolution, humans have been altering environments for much longer. I aim to understand how environmentally sensitive organisms have responded to to the intersection of anthropogenic impacts and climate change over millennial time scales.

Joaquín Rico

Honors Undergraduate Student

email: ricojo@oregonstate.edu

Research Focus:

My research is creating body size reconstructions from fragmentary fossil remains of packrats to better understand past ecosystems and their organization, and species responses to environmental change. I am using species-specific measurements on skeletal features that have a high probability of being preserved in the fossil record, to make my models taphonomically informed at the species level. My goal is to reconstruct body size trajectories from fragmentary fossils from a zooarchaeological site in Oregon that can then be compared against paleoclimate data to understand the effects that climate change and people had on woodrat body sizes since the last Ice Age.

Undergraduates

Holly Wojcik