Postdoctoral Researcher

University of Florida, Wildlife Ecology & Conservation

Biography

I’m a postdoctoral researcher in Emilio Bruna’s lab at University of Florida working on the effects of drought and habitat fragmentation on a tropical plant. I’m interested in the mechanisms of plant responses to stress and their consequences for natural and agricultural ecosystems. My Ph.D. focus was on the effects of climate change and insect herbivory on the quality (flavor and health benefits) of tea (Camellia sinensis).

Interests

Chemical ecology
Eco-metabolomics
Plant demography
Statistics and programming in R
Tea

Education

PhD in Biology, 2020
Tufts University
MS in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology, 2010
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
BA in Biology, 2006
Whitman College

Projects

Effects of drought and habitat fragmentation on a tropical understory plant.

My postdoctoral project in the Bruna lab at University of Florida involves analyzing long-term demographic data from an experimentally fragmented tropical forest experiment in Brazil.

webchem

An R package for accessing chemical information from the web.

Use of partial least squares regression (PLS) in ecology

PLS is a powerful multivariate regression method that has many applications for ecological data. When is it best used, what are its advantages, and how should you report your results?

bumbl

An R package for modeling bumblebee colony growth

Climate Effects on Bug-Bitten Tea

Eastern Beauty wulong tea is only produced from tea leaves damaged by leafhoppers. The induced volatiles produced by damaged tea plants gives the finished tea a unique flavor. How will leafhopper damage change in a warming climate, and how will that impact tea quality?

Teaching

I’ve been teaching biology ever since I was 12 when I became an interpretive guide at the Lindsay Wildlife Experience in my home town of Walnut Creek, CA. Since then I’ve taught science of all sorts to all ages in a variety of formats.

Selected Teaching Experience:

Ecological Statistics and Data. Spring 2020. I took over this course during my last semester as a PhD student as the instructor of record. I reorganized the syllabus and created new content to teach genearlized linear models and mixed effects models with ecological applications using R.
Biostatstics in R. Fall 2016–2018. Recitation section for BIO132 at Tufts University. In collaboration with Natalie Kerr in 2016 and Avalon Owens in 2018, we designed and taught this new course. Previously, BIO132 used SPSS rather than R and did not have a required recitation. Course materials available here.
Organisms and Populations. Spring 2015. Lab section for BIO0014 at Tufts University. I served as a graduate TA for a lab section of this course in a year when the course was being entirely redesigned. I actively participated in designing course materials and lab activities in addition to teaching my own lab section.
Introductory Biology. 2011 – 2014. I taught a guaranteed transfer credit lecture and lab course at Front Range Community College in Fort Collins, CO where I was an instructor. My students came from diverse age, socioeconomic, and learning backgrounds. I designed lectures and assessment materials and engaged in revising lab exercises and course materials. I attended professional development workshops including an especially helpful one on teaching veterans.

Recent Publications

webchem: An R Package to Retrieve Chemical Information from the Web

Eduard Szöcs, Tamás Stirling, Eric R. Scott, Andreas Scharmüller, Ralf B. Schäfer

PDF Project DOI

Changes in tea plant secondary metabolite profiles as a function of leafhopper density and damage

Eric R. Scott, Xin Li, Ji-Peng Wei, Nicole Kfoury, Joshua Morimoto, Ming-Ming Guo, Amma Agyei, Albert Robbat, Selena Ahmed, Sean B. Cash, Timothy S. Griffin, John R. Stepp, Wenyan Han, Colin M. Orians

Project DOI HTML

Combined impacts of prolonged drought and warming on plant size and foliar chemistry

Colin Orians, Rabea Schweiger, Jeffery Dukes, Eric R. Scott, Caroline Müller

DOI

Differential Changes in Tea Quality as Influenced by Insect Herbivory

Eric R. Scott, Colin M. Orians

Project DOI

Interactive effects of drought severity and simulated herbivory on tea (Camellia sinensis) volatile and non-volatile metabolites

Eric R. Scott, Xin Li, Nicole Kfoury, Joshua Morimoto, Wen-Yan Han, Selena Ahmed, Sean B. Cash, Timothy S. Griffin, John R. Stepp, Albert Robbat Jr., Colin M. Orians

Dataset DOI

See all publications

Press & Outreach

#TeaScienceTuesday on Instagram

Podcast and Radio Appearances:

Frequenza Della Scienza, a science program on Radio Študent, an independent Slovenian radio station.
Talking Tea
PhDrinking podcast

Invited Blog Posts:

Press

Drew L. 2019. The Growth of Tea. Nature Outlook
Olivia Reader and Colin Orians, 2020. Pests and Profits

Recent & Upcoming Talks

Impacts of insect herbivory on tea quality: strategies for a changing climate

Mar 26, 2021 10:30 AM — 11:30 AM

Benefits and barriers to the spread of bug-bitten tea

Jan 21, 2021

Using the right tool for the job: Understanding the difference between unsupervised and supervised analyses of multivariate ecological data

Aug 3, 2020

See all talks

Recent Posts

Treat your treatments as continuous

Taking a potentially continuous treatment, binning it into categories, and doing ANOVA results in reduced statistical power and complicated interpretation. Yet, as a graduate student, I was advised to bin continuous treatment variables into categories multiple times by different people.

Last updated on Nov 3, 2020 5 min read Blog

Three ways to plot logistic regressions

If your data is just 1’s and 0’s, it can be difficult to visualize alongside a best-fit line from a logistic regression. Even with transparency, the overplotted data points just turn into a smear on the top and bottom of your plot, adding little information.

Last updated on Aug 19, 2020 5 min read Blog

Looking under the hood with debug()

If you’ve ever tried to look “under the hood” of an R function, you know that sometimes it can be tricky to figure out what’s going on, especially if you use R more as a statistical tool than as a programming language.

Last updated on Jul 14, 2020 1 min read

COVID-19 pushed me to try something new in my classroom, and I loved it!

In March (which feels like years ago, now), when Universities started seriously thinking about their response to COVID-19, I was teaching Ecological Models and Data as instructor of record and finishing my dissertation up.

Last updated on Jun 15, 2020 4 min read Blog

Hacking GLMs to fit population growth models

I’m currently teaching Ecological Statistics and Data, a class I inherited from Lee Brown and Elizabeth Crone. In a lecture on population dynamics, they do some really cool things with generalized linear model—things that I don’t think are standard practice and as far as I can tell from googling, aren’t well documented.