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Andrea Rummel

Andrea Rummel

Assistant Professor of BioSciences

Biosciences

CONTACT

arummel@rice.edu

WEBSITE(S)| Profile | Rummel Lab

SURF Mentoring

Potential projects/topics: Bats are numerous in Houston and the surrounding areas, living in buildings, bridges, and caves. We have several projects involving our local bats for students to participate in: comparing microclimates in various types of bat roosts across seasons; assessing roost populations via emergence counts with video or acoustic data. These projects will require a minimal amount of fieldwork (going to roosts to maintain dataloggers and acoustic detectors and extract data, recording bat emergences with thermal cameras) and then computational and statistical work to process and analyze the data.

Potential skills gained: Students will gain experience with R, with different types of field data collection, digitizing video, analyzing echolocation calls.

Required qualifications:

  • Required skills: Some familiarity with R or a different programming language would be preferred but not required.
  • Preferred majors: Students who are interested in the Integrative or EEB tracks in the Biosciences major would be preferred.

Direct mentor: Faculty/P.I., Graduate Student

Research Areas

The Rummel Lab studies the physiology and mechanics of animal movement. Our research explores how locomotor physiology, thermal physiology, and biomechanics interact to determine an animal’s response to changing environmental conditions on short and long timescales. Using a combination of field and laboratory studies, we aim to understand how temperature affects complex locomotor processes across levels of biological organization, and how animals might respond to climate change and urbanization. We are currently working primarily in bats, the only mammals capable of powered flight, which also exposes them to a unique thermal environment; but we are also interested in other vertebrates such as lizards.