Join Our Lab

Postdoctoral Fellows

I currently do not have funding for postdocs, but anyone with funding who wants to work with me, or anyone who wants to pursue funding opportunities and would like my collaboration, please contact me with research ideas.

Graduate Students

Getting into the Graduate Program at Tufts University is fairly competitive. For students interested in my research, and in applying to Tufts University for graduate work with me: I will always consider taking on a new student given sufficient experience, qualifications, fit to my research interests, and room within my lab.

I currently am working on several projects focusing on sustainable suburban development and urban ecology in Massachusetts, and on wetland design and conservation of endangered Hawaiian waterbirds. As you might know from my web page, I am particularly interested in understanding extinction risk, and in the interface between behavior and population biology. Despite my being a "bird guy", my students have worked on amphibians, moss, and stress physiology, so I am not restricted to bird research. However, all of my students work on some aspect of population biology, or behavior, and conservation.

Let me give you a little background about our department's admissions process. Our admissions process in the Biology Department works a little differently than at other schools. We pride ourselves on being a diverse department with lots of different research interests. We thus do not admit students directly to any specific laboratories. Instead, we are looking for well-rounded students who can take advantage of our unique offerings. Part of what we look for is that students are excited about, and capable of learning about, biology at a variety of levels of biological organization (e.g. from molecules and cells to organismal physiology and ecology). This ultimately means that admission decisions are made by the department and not by individual professors. However, individual faculty can, and do, make recommendations about specific applicants that can strongly influence the admission decision. Please contact Eileen Magnant, the departmental secretary who coordinates applications, for details about applying.

If you have any questions about Michael Reed's work or openings in the lab, please feel free to contact Michael Reed.

Undergraduates

If you are interested in gaining research experience in the lab, please send me an email describing your academic record (a copy of your transcript is best), your reasons for wanting research experience, and SPECIFIC ideas you have about which aspect of our lab's research you would be most interested in and why. If you don't do these things it will tell me that you haven't researched the lab's work very well.