The Laverty Lab
We are a conservation science and wildlife ecology lab in the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Ecology at New Mexico State University.
Figure 1: Our lab’s logo! Designed by NMSU undergraduate student, Cyrillus Sidhe.
Figure 2: July 2026 lab photo of Flor Calderón, Taylor Pichler, Ryan Moore, Holly Whited, and Theresa Laverty. Missing Matt Becker and Melanie Solis Alvarez.
Recent Lab News
02-Jul-2026: Big day for the lab! Congratulations to Holly Whited for successfully defending her master’s thesis today on the nightly movements of lesser long-nosed bats outside a U.S. maternity colony. We’re also happy to report that Flor Calderón and Theresa earned a Share with Wildlife grant today from New Mexico Department of Wildlife for bat acoustic monitoring near wind energy development in central New Mexico.
08-Apr-2026: Congratulations to Ryan Moore for receiving a summer fellowship in the Jornada Basin Long-Term Ecological Research (JRN-LTER) summer graduate research fellowship program (GRFP)!
19-Dec-2025: Theresa will be coadvising Melanie Solis Alvarez’s M.S. project with Dr. Wiebke Boeing beginning this spring. Welcome to the lab, Melanie!
17-Nov-2025: Flor Calderón and Ryan Moore will be joining the lab as new Ph.D. students in the spring. Welcome, Flor and Ryan!
01-Oct-2025: Congratulations to Iona Rohan for successfully defending her M.S. thesis today! Her work focused on the effects of wind energy on the habitat use of terrestrial mammals in central New Mexico.
28-Jul-2025: Theresa coauthored a publication out today in Parasites & Vectors on the ectoparasites of two of Madasgascar’s fruit bats.
15-Jul-2025: Theresa had two publications come out this week! Check out the bat PIT tag paper in Journal of North American Bat Research and the paper highlighting the underrepresentation of bats in Africa’s protected areas in Conservation Biology.
30-May-2025: We’re excited to have Matt Becker joining the Frey and Laverty labs as a new Master’s student in the fall. Welcome, Matt!
14-May-2025: MSc student Taylor Pichler received the Ecological Society of America’s Forrest Shreve Student Research Award. Congrats, Taylor!
14-Apr-2025: MSc student Holly Whited was awarded the Southwestern Association of Naturalists’ Howard McCarley Student Research Grant. Congrats, Holly!
12-Apr-2025: Theresa and Brandi had a new paper published this week in Ecology and a companion photo gallery in The Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America highlighting lesser long-nosed bat movements as far as 1631 km!
02-Dec-2024: Theresa coauthored a new data paper published today in Scientific Data featuring > 17,000 curated locality records of African bats.
19-Sept-2024: The Frey and Laverty labs received funding from the Bureau of Land Management to continue researching the effects of wind energy development on terrestrial mammals. Visit Join the Lab for MS and eventual undergraduate position listings.
17-Jul-2024: We’re excited to have Taylor Pichler joining the lab as a new Master’s student in the fall. Welcome, Taylor!
07-Jun-2024: The Laverty Lab received funding from the Southwest Border Resource Protection Program to continue monitoring bats of greatest conservation need.
05-Jun-2024: The lab received an NSF BRC-BIO program award. Stay tuned for MS and undergraduate position announcements! Visit Join the Lab.
20-Nov-2023: Theresa coauthored a new paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
26-Jun-2023: Holly Whited will be joining the lab as a new Master’s student in the fall. Welcome!
04-May-2023: Theresa has a new paper out in BioScience.
09-Jan-2023: The Laverty Lab officially opens its doors at NMSU!
