William Wetzel
578 Wilson Rd., 205 CIPS Building
East Lansing, MI 48824
Dr. Wetzel received his PhD from the University of California, Davis in Population Biology in 2015. His dissertation examined the effects of intraspecific plant diversity on plant-herbivore interactions in natural ecosystems. From 2015-2016, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Thaler Lab at Cornell University, where he extended his work into agricultural systems by studying the effects of crop diversity on natural pest control by insect predators.
At Michigan State University, the Wetzel Lab studies the ecology of plants, insect herbivores, and predators. The lab's research focuses on how biological diversity and environmental variability influence ecological interactions and community patterns. Lab members work in both natural and agricultural systems and strive to answer fundamental biological questions that have implications for the environment and sustainability. They link patterns at population and community scales with mechanisms at organismal scales using mathematical and statistical modeling to integrate data from plant chemistry through to community dynamics. Dr. Wetzel joined the Plant Resilience Institute in 2020, and this has enabled him to develop a new line of research focused on the resilience of plant-insect systems to climate variability and extreme weather.
Click here to go to the Wetzel Lab website.
Click here to go to William Wetzel's Google Scholar Page.
Associations:
Department of Integrative Biology
Ecology, Evolutionary Biology, and Behavior Program