University of Georgia

A website from the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences

Biodiversity and Agroecology

Snyder Lab News

News from UGA (2019-present)

  • Carly Sharp won 1st place at the national ESA conference for her 10-minute presentation! Congrats, Carly!
  • Bill Snyder, Olivia Smith, and other past Snyder lab members have been honored as one of three International Champions of the Frontier Plant Prize! Read more here.
  • The Snyder lab has received a $750,000 USDA NIFA grant for the Chick-EES project. Read more about the project here.
  • Congratulations to Carly Sharp for her successful USDA NIFA fellowship! Carly’s grant was the only one awarded in the state of Georgia.
  • Congratulations to Scott Clem for his new faculty position at Illinois State University! Check out his new lab here.
  • Olivia Smith, Bill, and other past Snyder lab members’ paper on diversified agriculture was published in Science magazine!
  • Yale Environment 360 did a nice write-up and interview of Mike’s butterfly paper.
  • Wild Farm Alliance made a video about natural enemies featuring an interview with Bill and photos from lab members.
  • Scott Clem did a 60-Second Science bit with Scientific American on long-distance movement of hoverflies.
  • Mike Crossley’s recent paper showing surprisingly healthy monarch butterfly populations in North America has received attention in the New York Times, National Geographic, and other news outlets including the Courthouse News Service, Phys.org, and UGA Today.
  • Snyder lab has moved! We are now in the Department of Entomology at the University of Georgia. New and exciting study systems and questions await!
Scott Clem talking to some children about insects.
Scott Clem with one of our lab tables at 2022 Insectival at the Botanical Garden.
The 2023 Snyder Lab in downtown Athens.
2023 Snyder Lab (minus Scott) celebrating Priscilla and Garrison’s successful defenses!
Carly Sharp sitting with the rest of UGA's Entomology Games team.
Carly Sharp was one of the members of UGA’s 2023 Entomology Games Team.
Woman in a farm field leading an educational session for a group of farmers
Carly Sharp co-led a farmer field day about balancing soil fertility and organic pesticide management in 2024. Photo Credit: Jenna Shea Photojournalism
Girl standing next to science fair poster in convention hall
Snyder Lab high school intern, Natalia Kurz, presented her greenhouse experiment at the 2025 Georgia Science and Engineering Fair at UGA!
A group of people posing in front of a sign for a MANRRS conference
Malcolm Peavy attended the MANRRS 39th Annual Training Conference and Career Expo in Memphis in 2025.

News from WSU (2010-2019)

  • Welcome to Mike Crossley, who has just joined the lab as a postdoc. Mike completed his PhD with Sean Schoville at the University of Wisconsin, and at UGA he will examine the evolutionary ecology of formerly-benign herbivores that suddenly emerge as crop pests.
  • Congratulations to Amanda Meier and Olivia Smith, who received prestigious USDA-NIFA Fellowships this spring!
  • Matt Jones’s recent paper on the ecology of food safety, published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, was named Editor’s Choice article and received widespread popular-press attention including an article in The Economist magazine.
  • Clemson did a nice news release describing Carmen Blubaugh‘s new Ecology paper.
  • PhD student Olivia Smith organized an interesting webinar discussing online farm-biodiversity tools, along with an international group of collaborators.
  • Welcome to Amanda Meier, who accepted a postdoc position in the lab. Amanda completed her PhD with Mark Hunter at the University of Michigan, and at UGA she will continue her work linking soil and plant health.
  • Postdoc Carmen Blubaugh has started a faculty position in the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences at Clemson. Congrats Carmen! You can read about her new lab here.
  • PhD student Olivia Smith has published a series of outreach articles discussing the varied roles of wild birds on organic farms.
  • Congratulations to Karol Krey, who successfully defended her PhD and headed to a postdoc at the University of Florida.
  • Undergrad researcher Elizabeth Magill stars in this video describing her experiences as a woman in STEM, in honor of International Women’s Day.
  • Congratulations to PhD student Jessa Thurman, who received ARCS and Fulbright Fellowships! Jessa is spending her Fulbright year studying biological control in Australia.
  • Bill co-led a “how to get your paper published and cited” workshop at the Oikos Meeting in Denmark, and one of the graduate students that participated wrote a nice description of what we discussed.
  • Congratulations to undergraduate researchers Elizabeth Magill and Sabrina Judson, who shared first place at the 2017 BIOAg poster competition. Carmen Blubaugh mentored poster prep.
  • Joseph Taylor‘s predator ecology work was featured in the Seattle Times. Changing the world, one beetle at a time!
Three students sorting insects into petri dishes.
Snyder lab members sorting insects for a project.
Bill and a group of students posing outside a building.
Bill with some former Snyder lab members.
Bill inspecting a plant in the field.
Bill inspecting a plant. Important work.