Graduate Student News: new grants for ant research

Congratulations to Israel Del Toro, who received two grants last month. The University of Massachusetts Natural History Collections awarded him $3000 for his collections-based research on distribution of ants in eastern North America, and the Ecological Society of America's Strategies for Ecology Education Diversity and Sustainability (SEEDS) program gave Del Toro the SEEDS Alumni Award, which will cover his expenses to attend this summer's ESA meetings in Pittsburgh. Del Toro is completing his first year of graduate work in the Organismic and Evolutionary Biology program at the University of Massachusetts. His dissertation research, supervised by Harvard Forest Senior Ecologist Aaron Ellison, focuses on the responses of North American ants to climatic change. In addition to collecting ants throughout northeastern North America, Del Toro's research takes advantage of the ongoing "Warm Ants" experiment at Harvard Forest.