Justin Wright is moving his lab from Duke University to Cornell University's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, effective January 1, 2027.
Wright Lab
Biodiversity & Ecosystem Function

People

The people behind the lab

Understanding the causes and consequences of changing biodiversity across the planet takes a group willing to work in any system, on any organism, that helps answer the question. Below are the people doing that work now, and the alumni who've carried it forward into faculty positions, agencies, and industry.

Current lab members

Listed in order of time in the group

Justin Wright

Justin Wright

Principal Investigator

While much of my research has focused on wetland plant communities, I am willing to study any organism and work in any ecosystem to answer questions that interest me. I've worked in systems ranging from tropical streams to desert shrublands and am always looking for ways to explore the causes and consequences of patterns of biological diversity across the planet. My research program combines observational and experimental approaches with modeling to develop and test hypotheses and build towards synthetic ecological theory.

CV | Google Scholar Profile · Email: jw67 (at) duke.edu

Richard Wong

Richard Wong

PhD Candidate

Richard (he/him) joined the lab in August 2020. He is interested in climate change effects on food web structure and nutrient cycling within the fluid of pitcher plants, using this unique system to inform conservation and preservation efforts regarding the response of larger aquatic systems to environmental change. Co-advised by Jean Philippe Gibert.

Email: richard.j.wong@duke.edu

Aeran Coughlin

Aeran Coughlin

PhD Candidate

Aeran (they/them) is interested in the ecosystem and community-level effects of interactions between plants and soil microbes, and how these processes are impacted by climate change. Their PhD work seeks to understand the role of plant-microbe interactions in community composition shifts and large-scale tree mortality events (ghost forests) in forested coastal wetlands caused by sea level rise and salt water intrusion, and how fire interacts with these mechanisms in both the formation of ghost forests and post-mortality regeneration.

Twitter: @aeran_coughlin · Email: aeran.coughlin [at] gmail.com

Yuyang Wang

Yuyang Wang

PhD Candidate

Yuyang (she/her) joined the Bernhardt and Wright labs jointly in Fall 2024. She is broadly interested in the ecological causes and consequences of plant species introductions within a global change framework, focusing on the common reed Phragmites and cordgrass Spartina in salt marsh ecosystems.

Email: yuyang.wang@duke.edu

You could be next

Visit the Join the Lab page if you're interested in becoming part of the research group.

Lab alumni

Where the lab has gone on to

Since the lab's founding, students, postdocs, and technicians have gone on to lead their own labs, agencies, and research programs. Organized by role:

Graduate Students

  • David S. De La Mater III — Ph.D. defended December 2024. "Functional Biogeography; intraspecific variation in form & function." Coadvised by Dr. Brian Silliman.
  • Anna E. Nordseth — Ph.D. defended May 2024. "Fruiting, Frugivory, and Fieldwork: Ecological Interactions and Actors in a Changing World."
  • Anita Simha — Ph.D. defended May 2024. "History is Not the Past: Exploring Historical Contingency in Ecological Theory, Disturbance Recovery and Community Assembly."
  • Emily Ury — Ph.D. defended 2021. "Ecosystem Consequences of Sea Level Rise and Salinization in North Carolina's Coastal Wetlands."
  • Cari Ficken — Ph.D. defended March 2018. "Scaling individual plant responses to fire and resource availability to community composition and disturbance-recovery."
  • Aspen Reese — Ph.D. defended May 2017. "Ecological forces in microbial communities: experimental tests of community ecology theory in soil and the mammalian gut."
  • Marissa Lee — Ph.D. defended April 2016. "Leaf traits, neighbors, and abiotic factors: ways that context can mediate the impact of invasive species on nitrogen cycling."
  • Amanda Koltz — Ph.D. defended May 2015. "The changing structure and function of arthropod food webs in a warming arctic."
  • Si-Yi "Jenny" Wang — Ph.D. defended June 2011. "Causes and functional consequences of denitrifying bacteria community structure in streams affected to varying degrees by watershed urbanization."
  • Eileen Thorsos — M.S. defended Dec 2011

Postdocs

  • Rachel Mitchell — now Asst. Professor, Northern Arizona University
  • Greg Ames — now Data Scientist, Novozymes

Research Associates

  • Jeri L. Parrent — Lab Manager & Research Associate, joined September 2022. PhD, Duke Graduate Program in Ecology, studying elevated CO2/nitrogen deposition effects on plant-mycorrhizal community dynamics; also studied salinity effects on foliar fungal endophytes along the NC coast.
  • Steve Anderson — research associate/lab manager, 2011–2014; primary focus on Longleaf Pine savannah research at Fort Bragg. Continues at Duke as a research associate in the Bernhardt lab.
  • Bonnie McGill — lab manager, 2007–2012 (with lab pup Bowie-wan Kenobi). Completed her Ph.D. at Michigan State University.

Undergraduate Students

  • Courtney Hill, Duke class '19 — "Hidden Stories of the Ground Layer: Potential Mechanisms Driving Community Changes in Invertebrates due to Microstegium vimineum"
  • Morgan Irons, Duke class '17 — "The Development of Ecological and Environmental Mechanisms to Drive Primary Succession in the Establishment of a Closed Ecological System on Mars"
  • James Cho, Duke class '16 — "Island biogeography vs physiochemical controls on zooplankton diversity and communities"
  • Donnie Vineyard, Duke class '13 — "Annual growth in a pine savanna is driven by interactions between fire and climate"
  • Jamie Peeler, Duke class '12 — "Trait plasticity of tree species in response to changing disturbance regimes in the Kruger National Park"
  • Kiki Contreras, Duke class '12 — "Effects of biotic and abiotic environments on the distribution, growth, and mortality of juvenile clams in the San Juan Islands, WA"
  • Sarah Diehl, Duke class '09 — "Microstegium vimineum, an invasive grass, affects tree germination, soil communities, and nitrogen cycling in a riparian system."
  • Nate Emery, Duke class '07 — "Functional diversity and the invasibility of an exotic grass (Microstegium vimineum)"
  • Andrew Gloterman, Duke class '07 — "Predictors of Microstegium vimineum and their implications in stream restorations of central North Carolina."
  • Tomás Delgado, Duke class '25 — BS in Biology and Computer Science, minor in Bioinformatics. Honor's thesis on competitive interactions between root-associated fungal cultures exposed to varying salt concentrations.
  • Summer Walker, Duke class '25 — Environmental Science and Biology. Senior independent research project in conservation biology and ecological restoration.

Technicians

  • Fabio Baptista
  • Laureen Echiverri
  • Cherissa Dukelow
  • Malia Losordo
  • Hannah Kisley
  • Cinnamon Mittan
  • Kirsten Moy
  • Kirin Riddell
  • Allison Rowe
  • Boris Senatorov
  • Samantha Walker

Work-Study Students

  • Samir Arora, Rachel Bangle, Matt Barnett, Gaby Benitez, Ansel Bubel, Shanay Conaway, Kiki Contreras, Ashley Green, Catherine Henry, Molly Johnson, Aimee Lansdale, Emma Loewe, Joseph Lozier, Sharon Luong, Libby Malcolm, Matthew McCann, Miles Muller, Haylee Newton, Cameron Oswalt, Tuana Phillips, Gabriel Sneed, Josh Unghire, Kristin Vaughn, Rachel Workin, Cha Yang, Kathy Zhou