Dr. Caitlin Wells has been a postdoctoral fellow in the Aubry lab at Colorado State University since 2019. She received her Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of California, Davis, working with Dirk Van Vuren on the role of kinship in asocial ground squirrels. After postdoctoral work in conservation genomics at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and University of Oregon, she has returned to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado, as Co-PI of the 30-year golden-mantled ground squirrel project. Her research has been published in a variety of journals including Animal Behaviour, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, Journal of Zoology, Conservation Biology, Biological Conservation, and Molecular Ecology.
Dr. Wells’s postdoctoral research is on the life-history responses of hibernating squirrels to climate change. With support from the Cameron Award, she is combining molecular and behavioral approaches to examine the physiological bases of accelerated life-histories under warming and drying conditions.