Marina did a great job on her defense yesterday, successfully defending her dissertation entitled “Modeling Southeast Asian Bat Distributions: Assessing the Effect of Ecology and Spatial Biases on Model Accuracy”. The first data chapter is in revision for Ecological Informatics. Thanks to her committee members Nancy McIntyre, Dylan Schwilk, Guofeng Cao, and Rich Strauss for their service and support of Marina. Thanks also to Blake Grisham for acting as Dean’s Rep.

Kendra successfully defended last Wednesday — yay! Her dissertation title is “Response of Cave-roosting Bats to Complex Environmental Gradients: an Assessment across Assemblage-, Species- and Population-levels”. The first chapter is in revision for Biological Conservation, which is great. Thanks to her committee members Nancy McIntyre, Bill Resetarits, Jodi Sedlock, Rich Strauss for their service and support of Kendra. Thanks also to Richard Stevens for acting as Dean’s Rep.

March is defense season at TTU, and we had a very busy and successful month. A hearty congratulations to Julie, Nick and Colleen for great presentations and bodies of work :-). Here are the titles:

Juliana Senawi: The Relationship between Morphology and Ecological Performance in Malaysian Insectivorous Bats. PhD Zoology. (My FIRST PhD student to graduate — YAY!).

Nick Goforth: Short-Term Effects of Wildfire on Bat Activity. MS Natural Resource Management.

Colleen Martin: Effectiveness of Operational Mitigation in Reducing Bat Mortality and an Assessment of Bat and Bird Fatalities at the Sheffield Wind Facility, Vermont. MS Wildlife, Aquatic, and Wildlands Science and Management.

Julie returns to her lectureship in Malaysia at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, while Colleen and Nick will be staying on in Lubbock for a bit while they plan the next move in their careers. We wish them the very best for the future, even though they will be missed from the lab.