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Dr. Mercedes Ebbert

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Dr. Mercedes EbbertHi! I traveled a lot when I was a kid, and the best part of seeing new places was getting to know different kinds of woods, beaches and waterways.

I always had a small zoo of pets, and so when I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I thought maybe I’d be a vet. But once I found out that scientists get paid to think about new and interesting things while they poke around in the lab and the field, I decided that was what I wanted to be.

When I got to graduate school at Yale University, I picked evolutionary biology because it tries to explain how the natural world got to be so fascinating.

I worked on infections in Drosophila that kill all the sons of the infected mothers, earning a MS, a MPhil and a PhD. During my postdoc at The Ohio State University, I worked with plant diseases in agroecosystems, and so became something of an ecologist.

Now I work on infections in the communities of flies that live in and around the East Coast’s hardwood forests. When I was a visiting professor and scientist at the Bard College MAT program, I worked with secondary school teachers on how best to bring science into the classroom.

At SUNY Orange, I teach Anatomy and Physiology I and II, and Introductory Biology. When I am not at work I am enjoying my family, my friends, my garden, reading fantasy and science fiction and playing around with various crafts.