Dr. Atticus Murphy
POSTDOCTORAL NETWORK | Global Change Center
Postdoctoral Associate
Faculty Mentors: Dr. Ashley Dayer and Dr. Elizabeth Hunter
Department of Fish & Wildlife Conservation
atticusm@vt.edu
Google Scholar • Website
Dr. Murphy is an interdisciplinary ecologist interested in understanding how human behaviors collectively produce emergent outcomes for animal populations and landscapes. His work generally focuses on population ecology, conservation, and global change. He received his PhD from Tufts University in 2025, working on urban pollinators and gardens. In that work, he studied social contagion of urban gardening, a process through which environmentally friendly practices spread between neighbors, altering the configuration and ecological impacts of these habitats. He also studied ecological restoration for monarch butterflies along the Coast Range of California, where populations have undergone steep declines due to global warming and other human impacts.
Currently, in the Dayer and Hunter Labs, he is working as part of a project aiming to understand how marshes and coastal working lands along the Atlantic U.S. will be impacted by rapid sea level rise in the coming years. They are building agent-based models to capture how private landowners’ responses to seawater alter the progression of saltwater impacts over time.
The GCC postdoctoral network connects our outstanding postdoctoral researchers to our broader GCC community, and provides them with a variety of professional development opportunities such as training in mentorship, grant writing, and science communication.
