Through its program of fellowships, the Ford Foundation seeks to increase the diversity of the nation’s college and university faculties by increasing their ethnic and racial diversity, maximize the educational benefits of diversity, and increase the number of professors who can and will use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students.

Laurent Duverglas, PhD graduate student in Dr. Carol Boggs' lab, was just awarded a Ford Foundation Doctoral Fellowship to conduct his research project. Laurent is investigating the effects of tri-trophic interactions on the population dynamics of herbivores using the introduced Euphydryas gillettii system at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. Laurent will first examine the significance of intraguild predation, an understudied interaction critical to insect population dynamics.  He will then test whether the success (i.e., population persistence) of an introduced population may be attributed to having left behind its localized enemies. Lastly, he will develop a theoretical model to evaluate the effects of overlapping trophic modules on specialist herbivore population dynamics. and to disentangle the effects of unintentional omnivory on the members of a top-down food web. Congrats Laurent!