News

October 14, 2023

Leslie is excited to start an NSF rotator position

Leslie will be working 80% time at NSF in the Division of Biological Infrastructure to help devise a new system for assessing project...

August 30, 2023

Welcome Anngely

The Ries Lab welcomes new graduate student Anngely Leeds to Georgetown! Anngely will be presenting past work at the...

August 25, 2023

Dr. Shirey (middle) with Dr. Ries (far left) and other Ries lab members at post-defense celebration (With Cake)

Congratulations Dr. Shirey!

Belated congratulations to Dr. Vaughn Shirey, who passed their dissertation defense with flying colors on May 12. Vaughn has been an...

July 09, 2019: Big day for publications, not so much for field work.

This week ended a disappointing few days of looking for Baltimore Checkerspots in the field (both in central New York and western Maryland). But our lack of success finding the elusive Euphydryas phaeton was balanced out by two papers being...

June 19, 2019: Vaughn arrives in Whitehorse for the start of his first field season!

Vaughn the intrepid arrived yesterday in Whitehorse and is settling in at the field station in far-western Canada. Tomorrow he heads out to Fairbanks to pick up Carl, his field assistant. Vaughn is going to be traveling around the Yukon this...

June 13, 2019: Leslie attends Monarchs & Milkweed (M&M) meeting at Oaksprings Botanical Library

Anurag Agrawal of Cornell arranged a meeting between monarch and milkweed biologists. It was held at the lovely The Oak Spring Garden Foundation in western Virginia. We learned about research done on the...

June 04, 2019: Baltimore checkerspot article published!

A study on the Baltimore checkerspot and its response to heatwaves during different seasons as well as feeding on an inferior, invasive hostplant is now published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. This research, led by Mariana Abarca...

April 25, 2019: Edge effect article disputing common wisdom about predators is online early at Ecology

A study that is a collaboration with our own Biology Department's Gina Wimp and Danny Lewis (as well as Shannon Murphy at Denver University) looking at edge effects on predators just was published online early in Ecology! The study looked at...

April 16, 2019: Mariana gives invited seminar at University of Maryland

Mariana gave a talk in the University of Maryland's Entomology Department. She talked about the research she is doing on Baltimore Checkerspots. UMD has been a center of activity in terms of conservation efforts for the species. There was a...

April 16, 2019: Vaughn Shirey receives a GRFP from NSF! Way to go Vaughn!!!

Wow! Its been a sweet couple of weeks for Vaughn. On top of the news that he received a National Geographic Explorer's award to carry out field research in Canada, he just found out that he was awarded a Graduate Research Fellowship from NSF....

March 21, 2019: Vaughn Shirey receives Nat'l Geo Explorer's Award

Vaughn just received an award that will cover expenses to do butterfly research in the Boreal forests of the Yukon this summer. He will be working with Greg Breed, a collaborator from University of Alaska - Fairbanks. Vaughn will be accompanied...

February 15, 2019: Fall migration paper accepted for publication in PNAS!

A collaborative research paper (led by Sarah Saunders and Elise Zipkin of Michigan State University) showing that monarch overwinter colony size is still primarily driven by summer population size, but that only nectar availability during fall...

December 12, 2018: Ries gives talks at MSU and Kellog Biological Station

Leslie gave a talk at MSU on monarchs hosted by her good friend and former lab-mate Elise Zipkin. She met there with many collaborators, including students and post-docs from the Zipkin lab and also Scott Swinton who she is working on a...