Sevan Suni

Sevan grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, then attended Colorado College and received her bachelors in biology in 2004. She now studies behavioral ecology and genetics of harvester ants, and will receive her PhD from Stanford in 2009.

In the future, she hopes to conduct research on how ecological communities respond to climatic changes, and is eager to visit areas of the world where changes are already apparent. Sevan’s interest in understanding the natural world began when she was a young girl and her mother used to name birds as they sang in the springtime. She spent endless hours outside and developed an appreciation for the wild things of her neighborhood, but grew frustrated by the limits of suburbia. She then moved to Colorado where the biological diversity seemed as endless as the mountains, and conducted a project for the Colorado State Parks to help conserve a rare species of monkey flower. She discovered a passion for not only observation, but analysis, and decided to go to graduate school in ecology.

While in graduate school she conducted research to better understand how genetic diversity is maintained in populations of harvester ants. This led to an interest in how species diversity is maintained in ecological communities, and how communities change in response to climate change and habitat perturbations. She is currently collaborating with conservation biologists in Stanford’s ecology department, investigating how different species of tropical bees are responding to forest fragmentation. She hopes that her research will contribute to understanding and sustainable management of wild areas.