Elizabeth Carlen

Elizabeth is a PhD candidate in the Biological Sciences department at Fordham University in New York City. Currently, she works in the Munshi-South lab which studies how cities influence the ecology and evolution of organisms. Her current work, on how urbanization has affected the evolution of feral pigeons in the Northeastern Megacity (Boston, MA to Washington, DC), has been featured on Saturday Night Live and led The New York Times to refer to her as the “Pigeon Stalker”. In addition to her dissertation research, she is a co-founder and editor of the urban evolution blog Life in the City: Evolution in an Urbanizing World. Before moving to New York City to study pigeons, she studied mammals in rural, suburban, and urban ecosystems, which led her to ask questions about how humans have influenced the distribution, genetic diversity, and interactions of species.