important For all
A sincere interest in outreach, science communication, and diversity/inclusion is important for prospective lab members at any career level. We explicitly consider interest in or evidence of this commitment as part of the recruitment and evaluation process for our lab. After joining the lab, you will have multiple opportunities to participate in our ongoing broader impacts activities. Lab members also receive training (and support and encouragement from everyone in the lab!) on how to design, lead, and assess the effectiveness of new activities associated with their independent projects. Please see our Outreach page for descriptions of some of our activities!
Postdocs
Our lab does not currently have any open postdoc positions, although this could change over the next year. For exceptional candidates whose skills and interests are aligned with our lab's major project areas, I would consider working together on a postdoc fellowship application that could support your position in our lab regardless. Please contact me via email if you would like to discuss this possibility.
Graduate students
I do not anticipate accepting graduate students for the Fall 2025 admission cycle.
Looking further forward than this, PhD student training opportunities may be available in 1. Human evolutionary medicine, 2. Parasite-human co-evolutionary history (for a review on some of the potential of this area of research, see here), or 3. The long-term ecological and evolutionary implications of human-environment interactions (here is a review on this area of research). Your background for working in these areas could be in Anthropology, Biology, Microbiology, Parasitology, Bioinformatics, or any other relevant disciplines.
undergraduates
We enjoy having undergraduate student participants in our research laboratory. Our lab is interdisciplinary, so any PSU major is welcome. We typically start with an opportunity for students to work directly with a graduate student or postdoc on an experimental or computational portion of a project they are leading. Thereafter, many accepted undergraduates have been interested in ultimately leading their own research project after a training period; doing so requires a major commitment and independent drive (note that for most projects you would need to develop computer science and bioinformatics skills), but can result in an exceptional experience. Several of these projects have resulted in first-author publications for our undergraduate researchers - for example Thompson et al., Vukelic et al., Evanitsky et al., and Arner et al. - and undergraduate students have co-authored many of our other papers. See our People page for descriptions of the research projects of current and previous undergraduate lab members. If you are interested in joining our lab as an undergraduate researcher, please email Dr. Perry describing your background and interest.