Vaughn Shirey
Defended the Thesis: May 12, 2023
Thesis Advisor: Dr. Leslie Ries
Thesis Title: Detecting Signals of Recent Climate Change in North America, Cold adapted butterfly Communities and Populations.
Vaughn graduated with a B.S. in Environmental Science from Drexel University in 2017. There, Vaughn worked with Dr. Jon Gelhaus on crane fly systematics alongside doing biodiversity informatics work with museum specimens. Following graduation, Vaughn moved to Helsinki, Finland to work as a Fulbright Study/Research Fellow with Dr. Pedro Cardoso at the Finnish Museum of Natural history investigating data bias in biodiversity databases. They worked with Dr. Leslie Ries at Georgetown to understand connections between butterfly metacommunity dynamics and climate change in North American boreal forests.