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Lawing, Michelle

Michelle Lawing

Associate Professor
Office:  
WFES 322
Email:  
Michelle Lawing's Website

Education

Undergraduate Education
B.S. Biology, University of Texas at Arlington
Graduate Education
M.S. Biology, University of Texas at Arlington
Ph.D. Double Major, Indiana University • Evolution, Ecology and Behavior • Geological Sciences (Paleobiology)

Areas of Expertise

  • Global Change Biology
  • Paleobiology
  • Macroecology
  • Community Ecology
  • Spatial Ecology
  • Biogeography
  • Functional Ecology
  • Evolution
  • Phylogenetic Comparative Methods
  • Geometric Morphometrics
  • Conservation Biology
  • Quantitative Methods
  • Informal STEM Learning

Professional Summary

Michelle Lawing, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Ecology and Conservation Biology at Texas A&M University and a visiting fellow in the Department of Biology at the University of Pisa in Italy. Her research is focused on how biodiversity responds to climate change and her approach involves interdisciplinary work at the nexus of conservation biology, ecology, evolution, and paleontology. Her work includes the investigation of geographic, evolutionary, and morphological responses of species and communities to environmental changes in the Anthropocene, Late Pleistocene, and throughout the Miocene to present. She is involved in developing methods to better harness ecological niche and species distribution models, geometric morphometric models, and phylogenetic comparative methods. Before joining TAMU, Dr. Lawing was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS).

 

Selected Publications

Reinke, B. A., Cayuela, H., Janzen, F. J., Lemaître, J. F., Gaillard, J. M., Lawing, A. M., … & Miller, D. A. (2022). Diverse aging rates in ectothermic tetrapods provide insights for the evolution of aging and longevity. Science, 376(6600), 1459-1466.
Walkup, D. K., Lawing, A. M., Hibbitts, T. J., & Ryberg, W. A. (2022). Biogeographic consequences of shifting climate for the western massasauga (Sistrurus tergeminus). Ecology and evolution, 12(2), e8599.
Siciliano‐Martina, L., Light, J. E., Riley, D. G., & Lawing, A. M. (2022). One of these wolves is not like the other: morphological effects and conservation implications of captivity in Mexican wolves. Animal Conservation, 25(1), 77-90.
Short, R. A., & Lawing, A. M. (2021). Geography of artiodactyl locomotor morphology as an environmental predictor. Diversity and Distributions, 27(9), 1818-1831.
Struminger, R., Short, R. A., Zarestky, J., Vilen, L., & Lawing, A. M. (2021). Biological Field Stations Promote Science Literacy through Outreach. BioScience, 71(9), 953-963.
Lawing, A. M. (2021). The geography of phylogenetic paleoecology: integrating data and methods to better understand biotic response to climate change. Paleobiology, 47(2), 178-197.
Lawing, A. M., Blois, J. L., Maguire, K. C., Goring, S. J., Wang, Y., & McGuire, J. L. (2021). Occupancy models reveal regional differences in detectability and improve relative abundance estimations in fossil pollen assemblages. Quaternary Science Reviews, 253, 106747.

All Publications