Ph.D position on Physiological Ecology of Flying Foxes in Australia — McGuire Lab at TTU

My colleague here at TTU, Dr Liam McGuire, has an awesome PhD position available. See the advert and contact details below:

The McGuire lab at Texas Tech University is looking for a highly motivated PhD student to work as part of an NSF-funded collaborative study of flying foxes and Hendra virus in Australia. The successful applicant will work with an international and multidisciplinary team of collaborators, seeking to understand how human influences affect Hendra virus spillover events. As human development clears native forest resources, flying foxes that are traditionally nomadic or migratory have increasingly established permanent resident camps in urban and peri-urban areas. The PhD student will lead efforts to study the nutritional ecology, foraging dynamics, energetics, and stress physiology of resident flying foxes compared to migratory populations. Experience working with bats is an advantage, but more important is experience with ecophysiology methods such as energetics, nutritional physiology, and stress physiology. Fieldwork will extend for periods of up to 1 year in Australia, and therefore the successful candidate must be independent, motivated, and well organized, able to work well with a large team of collaborators under challenging field conditions. Another PhD position related to the project will be available in the Plowright lab at Montana State University, focusing on immunology and virus dynamics in flying foxes.

Anticipated start date for the position is January 1, 2018. For more information about the project, contact Liam McGuire (liam.mcguire@ttu.edu). The position will be based at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, but extended periods of fieldwork will be conducted in Australia. Interested students should send a CV and brief summary of relevant experience to Liam McGuire (liam.mcguire@ttu.edu).

Special Issue in Diversity “Diversity and Conservation of Bats” — submissions wanted!

I am the guest editor for a special issue in the journal Diversity entitled “Diversity and Conservation of Bats”. Submissions are due before 31st March 2018, so plenty of time to pull together some great papers!  The scope address the following:  i) the diversity and distribution of bats; ii) the effect of human activities (e.g., landuse change, hunting, roost disturbance, climate change) on bat behavior, populations, diversity, distributions, or ecosystem function; iii) drivers of human activities that threaten bats (e.g., attitudes, knowledge, perceptions, economics); and iv) conservation applications, particularly those that evaluate evidence of success.

For full details, head to the issue page here:

Diversity and Conservation of Bats

Kendra recently published in the journal and had a good experience with them. Once the article is accepted, it is up in the issue almost immediately, and the review process was also very efficient.  So, I look forward to seeing submissions.