The Forister lab works in the areas of specialization, diversification, and plant-insect ecology. Specific questions and topics include the evolution of diet breadth, evolutionary interactions across trophic levels, phenology and population regulation. We are also interested in the conservation and management of insect diversity. In the field, our research includes the Great Basin, the Sierra Nevada, and much of the western hemisphere including tropical sites. In the lab, we combine physiological and behavioral experiments with genomic sequencing of novel-model organisms.
Vaidyanathan (Ravi) Subramanian
Ravi Subramanian is currently an associate professor of chemical engineering. He is on the graduate faculty of the Electrical and Biomedical Engineering Department and an adjunct in the Chemistry Department. He is also the solar energy thrust area coordinator in the Renewable Energy Center at the University. His area of research focus is on nanostructured materials for solar energy utilization. He has expertise in the synthesis, characterization and application of photoactive materials in photovoltaics, clean fuel production and environmental remediation. In his 12 years of research he has developed inorganic materials including semiconductor-semiconductor and semiconductor-metal nanocomposites for applications related to solar energy utilization and fuel cells.
Materials discovery and devices development to harvest solar energy continues to be a challenge. Eco-friendly and earth abundant elements have a great potential to harvest solar energy. With solar energy: your future is bright!
Robert Sheridan
Our research revolves around highly reactive organic molecules. These unstable and elusive intermediates, such as carbenes, nitrenes, and biradicals, are especially important in photochemistry, but their chemistry and properties are poorly understood. Moreover, these molecules are related to searches for organic conducting and magnetic materials. Much of the organic synthesis that we carry out involves making previously unknown compounds, and we spend a considerable amount of our time developing new synthetic methods to tackle these challenging molecules. A specialized technique that we use to study reaction intermediates involves matrix isolation photochemistry. In this method, organic molecules are frozen into glasses of inert gas at extremely low temperatures (10 Kelvin). The samples are then irradiated with UV light to generate highly reactive intermediates. The low temperatures and high dilution in inert surroundings protect these otherwise unstable species from reaction. IR and UV spectra of the samples, acquired at low temperature, tell us a great deal about the bonding and structures of the products. Finally, we carry out a variety of ab initio and DFT electronic structure calculations to model the structures, spectra, and electronics of these novel molecules.
Scott Bassett
Dr. Bassett is a conservation biologist and geographic information systems specialist with over 15 years experience in using computers to address environmental planning issues. He has extensive experience in spatial modeling, habitat modeling, landscape ecology, military installation encroachment issues, urban/natural environment boundary and in conservation reserve assessment and planning.
Sergiu Dascalu
Dascalu is an associate professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Nevada, Reno. He received a master’s degree in automated control and computers from the Polytechnic of Bucharest, Romania and his doctorate in computer science from Dalhousie University, Canada. Dascalu is the director of the Software Engineering Laboratory (SOELA) at UNR and has served as PI or co-PI on various projects funded by federal agencies such as NSF, NASA, and ONR, as well as by industry organizations. Dascalu has more than 120 peer-reviewed publications and has been involved in the organization of many international conferences and workshops, from which he received numerous recognitions. Dascalu’s main research interests are in software engineering and human-computer interaction, particularly in software specification and design, software tools for scientific research, simulation environments and user interface design.
Sushil Louis
Dr. Louis works in Genetic Algorithms, Evolutionary Computing and their applications to Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Optimization. His current work investigates adaptive AI for RTS-games, interaction design for controlling large numbers of heterogeneous, semi-autonomous entities, and generating real-time micro for game and real-world agents. The Evolutionary Computing Systems Lab (ECSL), which I direct, has investigated new techniques for machine learning using Case-Injected Genetic AlgoRithms (CIGAR), new techniques for playing to learn to play computer games, and new techniques for evolving Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game micro and macro.
Thomas Albright
Thomas Albright employs landscape ecological and biogeographic perspectives to understand the causes and consequences of environmental change at local to global scales. His work has examined the role of climate and human dispersal in the spread of invasive plants in the US and China, the effects of extreme weather and disturbance on avian communities across the US, and the rate and patterns of land cover change and desertification in the West African Sahel. In his research and teaching, Dr. Albright employs a variety of remote sensing platforms, field data, GIS, spatial analysis, and hierarchical modeling. His remote sensing work has included inventories of glacier cover in the Himalaya using synthetic aperture radar, documenting the rise and fall of the world’s largest water hyacinth infestation in East Africa, and characterizing heat waves using thermal remote sensing. Dr. Albright has a long history of international research, applications, and teaching from over 15 countries and speaks French and Spanish proficiently.
William Arnott
Dr. Arnott develops and deploys photoacoustic instruments for measurement of black carbon emission from vehicles in source sampling, and in ambient air quality studies. These measurements are often combined with other real time particulate emission measurements for the larger purpose of establishing detailed knowledge of the conditions giving rise to most of the black carbon and particulate emission to the atmosphere, and their environmental impacts. He teaches courses in the Atmospheric Sciences Program and Physics Department at the University of Nevada, Reno.