Dr. Meryl Mims

FACULTY AFFILIATE   |   Global Change Center

Biological Sciences

Lab Website  •  Google Scholar  •  Dept Page

(540) 231-6799  •  mims@vt.edu

Dr. Meryl Mims’s research investigates how species’ traits and environmental attributes interact to influence community and population structure of aquatic organisms. Her research integrates the fields of population, community, and landscape ecology, and she uses a suite of approaches including population and landscape genetics, spatially explicit individual-based models, traits-based inference, species distribution models, and multivariate statistical tools.

The overarching goal of her research is to uncover, understand, and predict differential response of aquatic species to a changing landscape and climate. Dr. Mims works to bridge fundamental work in freshwater population and community ecology with applied conservation and management needs. Areas of research interest in the Mims Lab will include: 1) developing and testing traits-based approaches and multispecies assessments to prioritize regional management and conservation of freshwater species; 2) assessing species’ vulnerability to climate change across levels of biological organization, from genes to communities; 3) evaluating risk and response of aquatic organisms to climate-driven spatiotemporal changes in intermittent aquatic habitat in lotic and lentic systems.

Dr. Mims is an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech. She completed her Master's (2010) and PhD (2015) at the University of Washington in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. Mims then served as a Mendenhall Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the U.S. Geological Survey in Corvallis, Oregon, before joining the faculty at Virginia Tech.