Dr. Mercedes Ebbert
Contact Information:
- Office: RCSE-019B
- Phone: (845) 341-4247
- email: mercedes.ebbert@sunyorange.edu
Hi! 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.
