Newsletter

It has been as challenging a year for EEB as it has been for everyone at Tulane and beyond. But EEB entered 2020 on an upswing and despite the adversity of a global pandemic, our momentum has continued.

In 2018, I came to Tulane to as the new EEB Chair following David Heins, who served as chair for 19 years, retired. The department has been enriched by David’s leadership during his tenure as chair, especially in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina, which saw EEB recover and thrive.

EEB has continued to grow and diversify our faculty, students, research fields and curriculum. In addition to myself, EEB has hired three new tenure-track faculty members in the past three years: plant evolutionary biologist Katie Ferris, animal physiologist Alex Gunderson and disease ecologist Hannah Frank. In addition, we hired a new Professor of Practice, Jelagat Cheruiyot, in 2017.  

EEB faculty, undergraduates and graduate students have received a number of new federal research grants as well as prestigious awards and fellowships. For example, Jordan Karubian was named Duren Professor by Newcomb-Tulane College and Inaugural Scholar-in-Residence by the Center for Public Service at Tulane. And a variety of new courses have been added to our curriculum, reflecting the influx of new faculty with their new interests and expertise.

I’m excited about the future of EEB, and how the new classes and research programs of our faculty will help us recruit better qualified and more diverse undergraduate majors and graduate students. While 2020 represented a bump in the road, EEB is set to accelerate forward in 2021 and beyond!