Welcome to the Sousa Lab

***NEW SITE UNDER CONSTRUCTION***

Lots of changes afoot in the Sousa Lab.  All my graduate students have filed their dissertations or theses and flown the coop!  Congratulations to all 34 Sousa lab fledglings from first (J. Watanabe and C. Halversen in 1982) to last (L. Hendricks-Franco and A. Haynes in 2020), and all the wonderful in-betweens (see Lab Alumni list under People tab). Advising you, learning from you, hanging out with you, and watching you blossom into creative and rigorous scientists has been a tremendously rewarding experience for me, both personally and professionally. 

With the “lab nest” empty and after serving as a faculty member for 44 years, I retired from UC Berkeley on July 1, 2021. For the first 15 of those years (1977 - 1992), I was a member of the Department of Zoology, and for the remaining 29 years (1992 to 2021) I was a member of the Department of Integrative Biology.  Over that time, I supervised 31 PhD and 3 MA students, and served on roughly 200 qualifying exam and dissertation committees for graduate students from other labs, primarily in Integrative Biology and Environmental Science, Policy & Management.  I also served as Co-Director of the Environmental Sciences Program from 1996 - 2008, which was then a shared undergraduate major of the Colleges of Letters & Science and Natural Resources.  

I have now been appointed a Professor of the Graduate School and, although I will not be accepting any new graduate students to my own lab, I will continue to engage with graduate students as a member of qualifying exam and dissertation committees. For at least the next three years (June 2021 - July 2024), I will be sharing a research laboratory with Dr. Mary Power, who has also just retired.  We expect to have a whale of a good time discussing fun, interesting, and perhaps “important” topics in community ecology.  We also hope to launch some collaborative research projects.  As always, I will actively recruit undergraduate assistants for these and other research efforts.   So, keep an eye on this website for announcements of these opportunities.

Besides what you’ve found on this Home page, you can access additional information about the history and current activities of the lab via the banner menu at the top of each page. The Sousa Research pages briefly describe the three major research projects I’ve pursued as a Berkeley faculty member.  The Sousa Publications page provides a list of publications I have authored with links to pdf versions, if available.  While some of my graduate students have generously included me as an author on papers generated from their dissertation or thesis research, I have neither expected nor requested such authorship.  Other publications derived from my students' research that I was not invited to author do not appear here; these publications can be found on my former students' professional websites. The People page provides a list of the graduate students who completed their degrees in my lab, including dissertation or thesis titles, current positions (as of September 2021), and links to their websites or LinkedIn pages. The Photos page is mainly a vehicle for respectfully embarrassing these former students. The News page provides updates about notable events or activities in my lab or in the professional lives of my graduate students.  Ways to reach me appear on the Contact page.