PhD Candidate
forest ecology, spatial ecology, and forest pests
Advisor: Michael Dietze
Charlotte grew up in Vermont and received her BS in Earth and Environmental Sciences from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Prior to arriving at BU, Charlotte was a crew member with the Vermont Youth Conservation Corps, a horticulturist at Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh, PA, and served an AmeriCorps term as the Land Stewardship Coordinator at Kestrel Land Trust in Amherst, MA. From 2017-2020, Charlotte was a member of the Whitmore Lab at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, where she led citizen science efforts to locate and manage emerging populations of invasive forest pests, specifically hemlock woolly adelgid. Here at BU, Charlotte focuses on understanding underlying patterns and drivers of spatial heterogeneity in spongy moth outbreak severity, post-defoliation canopy recovery, and population spread in northeastern forests. She is also interested in trade-offs between growth and defense as a response to defoliation, and how these trade-offs influence tree mortality events during pest outbreaks. Beyond her research activities, Charlotte enjoys mentoring undergraduate students as part of the Harvard Forest summer REU program and BU’s Graduate Women in Science & Engineering (GWISE) student organization. She is fondly known as the Dietze Lab’s “most dangerous member.”