June 7, 2026
Blois Lab Updates – Summer 2026
We’ve got some exciting transitions ahead of us in the Blois Lab!
June 5, 2025
Congrats to Reina on submitting her first PhD chapter!
Here in the Blois Lab we are fans of celebrating all the wins along the way, so congrats to Reina on a PhD milestone. Reina just recently developed and submitted her first PhD manuscript for review. Her project looks at the relationship between fire (plus vegetation and climate) and small mammals across the California Sierra…
March 21, 2023
Summer Research Opportunity: Surveying Small Mammals in Yosemite National Park
Application Deadline: April 9th, 2023 Anticipated Timeline: May 30th, 2023 – August 11th, 2023 Compensation: full time, $15.50-17.73/hour We are currently looking for an undergraduate research assistant to help during the summer of 2023! The research assistant will work directly with graduate student Reina Warnert on various projects related to small mammal communities in Yosemite…
January 16, 2023
Welcome to 2023 in the Blois lab!
Great news to start off the year! The Blois lab had two papers accepted over the winter break. The first was a paper led by former PhD student Nate Fox, working with a great team to examine correspondence between small mammal isotope values and past climate at the La Brea Tar Pits. Then, former PhD…
June 30, 2022
New postdoc opportunity! NSF-funded Postdoc Positions in Paleoecology and Species Distribution Modeling
Marta Jarzyna at Ohio State and I were just awarded a new NSF grant to investigate the spatial and temporal non-stationarity of processes structuring communities. The project will leverage the fossil record of small mammals across the late Quaternary, simulations and species distribution modeling techniques, and trait datasets for small mammals. It’s super exciting! We…
December 17, 2019
Wrapping up 2019!
Just before the winter break, a flurry of publications! (ok, two, but that’s better than none!) After a long journey through the review process, I am so happy that this paper is finally published. It was led by Clarke Knight, who started the project as a Masters student with Ben Blonder and patiently and brilliantly…
August 13, 2018
Exciting new work coming soon, funded by an NSF CAREER grant!
A few months ago, I was notified that I got an NSF CAREER award! I’ve been sitting on the news for a while, while the details got worked out. But here’s the official announcement from UC Merced and the link to the award within the NSF Earth Sciences Division. Many thanks to NSF’s Sedimentary Geology…
June 8, 2018
Lots of excitement! Summer 2018 Lab News.
It’s been an exciting time in the Blois lab recently! * Jessica found out she was awarded tenure, which will become effective July 1st. * Eric recently had his first paper from his dissertation work accepted, forthcoming in the Journal of Biogeography. This paper explores the past potential range shifts among North American mammals, and…
April 9, 2018
Past and future climate novelty
We’ve got a new paper out! Collaborator Matt Fitzpatrick and Jessica, with other collaborators on our NSF-funded Community Paleomodeling project, co-lead a project to compare the estimates of future climate novelty with those from the past. Here’s a link to the paper. Spoiler alert: future climate novelty by AD 2100 meets or exceeds climate novelty…
November 14, 2017
New review paper on multiresponse algorithms!
Our review paper “Multiresponse algorithms for community-level modeling: review of theory, applications, and comparison to species distribution models” is available in Online Early today! This paper was spearheaded by Diego Nieto-Lugilde, a postdoc on the community paleomodels project with Matt Fitzpatrick. Check it out, and email Jessica if you need a pdf copy of the…