Undergraduate Faculty Advisors (2024-2025)
Melissa Pespeni is an Associate Professor of Biology in the College of Arts & Sciences. She is an evolutionary biologist whose research focuses on understanding how organisms adapt to changes in their environment through time and space. Her lab primarily works on marine invertebrates, sea urchins, sea stars, and copepods, due to their ecological importance, the threats they face, their tractability in the lab, and the passion they invoke in her and her students. The lab studies a wide range of stressors – ocean warming, ocean acidification, changes in salinity, plastic pollution, and pathogens. Dr. Pespeni is an Associate Editor for the Proceedings of the Royal Society London B and was the inaugural Director of the QuEST training program (now Biological Data Science – BilDS). Melissa is proud that it was QuEST trainees who founded our UVM SACNAS chapter. As a first-generation college student from a low-income family and Mexican American, Melissa values the community and resources that SACNAS offers and aims to support the SACNAS leaders in achieving both their short- and long-term goals.
Graduate Faculty Advisors (2024-2025)
Rory Waterman is a professor of chemistry with research interests in inorganic and organometallic chemistry, catalysis, and energy and environmental applications. He also works in professional development on many levels from co-founding the New Faculty Workshop in Chemistry to organizing Project SEED and ARO Research Apprenticeships programs at UVM, experience in helping students and new professionals that he is delighted to share with SACNAS Chapter leadership. His work has been recognized by a variety of awards including named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2020) and American Chemical Society (2019) as well as elected a member of the Vermont Academy of Science and Engineering (2019). His biggest aim in participating as a faculty advisor is to help the Chapter be strong and meet the long-term vision of its founding student leaders.
Dr. Ana (“Mindy”) Morales-Williams
Ana (“Mindy”) Morales-Williams is an Assistant Professor in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at UVM. She is a limnologist with research focusing on the role of anthropogenic disturbance and climate change in algal community assembly, linking fine scale physiological and ecological mechanisms with ecosystem and landscape scale processes. She’s a founding member of the Phycological Research Consortium, which holds annual workshops providing undergraduate and graduate student training and networking opportunities in algal research. In addition, she serves on the international steering committee of the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON), an organization that facilitates global multidisciplinary collaboration to understand the response of lakes to climate change. Her goal as a SACNAS chapter advisor is to build community and support chapter leadership in achieving their long-term goals.
Dr. Nunez leads the Nunez Lab at UVM. The primary goal of his lab is to quantify the relative contributions of selection and drift to the levels of genetic variation observed in natural populations. Current projects include characterizing the dynamics of rapid evolution in fluctuating ecosystems as well as understanding the genomic consequences of boom-and-bust demography in seasonal populations. To this end, his lab combines computational, experimental, and multi-omics approaches across a variety of study systems (e.g., fruit flies, barnacles, sea urchins, ants, and simulations). Dr. Nunez was a member of the Brown University chapter when he was a graduate student, and had many transformative experiences facilitated through SACNAS events. In his advisory role, Dr. Nunez’s goal is to support the chapter to ensure long-term sustainability as well as to aid in the professional development of all members.
Previous Faculty Advisors (2021-2024)
Dr. Laura J May Collado
Laura J May Collado is an Assistant Professor of biology at UVM and a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Her research interests are in marine soundscapes and marine mammal communication. Her research involves the use of phylogenies, field observations, autonomous underwater recording systems, and unmanned aerial vehicles to understand the evolutionary and ecological factors shaping the evolution of acoustic communication in marine organisms. In addition to provide students within and outside UVM opportunities for research in marine biology, she also administrates the small-grants-in-aid as the Chair of the Committee of Scientific Advisors Society for Marine Mammalogy and as co-founder of the NGO Panacetacea. Both grants support young scientists from countries around the world where research funding is limited. As an advisor to the SACNA Chapter, her goal is to help the leaders of the chapter to achieve their vision and goals for the chapter.