Penn State Altoona News

Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - 789 hits

Biology professor offers presentation on species interaction

The Biology degree program at Penn State Altoona will host a presentation by Dr. Tracy Langkilde, Penn State assistant professor of biology, on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 7 p.m. in room 207 of the Force Advanced Technology Center. Langkilde will offer a lecture titled "Boogie or Die: Native Lizards Adapt to Survive Invasion by Fire Ants."

Langkilde's are of interest is in how individual species interact with one another and their environment, and how responses to environmental changes can shape communities over multiple scales. Langkilde recently discovered that native fence lizards in the Southern United States rapidly evolved novel behavioral strategies and altered morphologies to avoid lethal attack by invasive fire ants. She is investigating the mechanisms behind these intriguing findings.

Langkilde has received several awards including the Jabez King Memorial Prize for the most meritorious Ph.D. thesis at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Sydney, and a Postgraduate Excellence Prize from the University of Sydney, and a New South Wales Young Tall Poppy Science Award from the Australian Institute of Political Sciences. In 2005 and 2006, she was awarded a Gaylord Donnelley Environmental Postdoctoral Fellowship in Forestry and Environmental Studies from Yale University. Langkilde earned her Ph.D. in biology in 2005 at the University of Sydney, where she worked on interspecific competition in lizards, and was awarded first class honors while earning her bachelor’s of science (1999) in biology at James Cook University in Australia. Langkilde has authored or co-authored about 40 scientific papers and served as a peer reviewer for over 30 journals.

This event is free and open to the public.