Noa Pinter-Wollman
Professor
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
University of California, Los Angeles
google scholar
Postdocs:
Dimitrios Georgios Kontopoulos (2025- )
Dimitrios studies how biological systems respond to temperature changes. He is currently funded by a Walter Benjamin Fellowship from the German Research Foundation to investigate how temperature influences social behavior in ants. Previously, Dimitrios was an EMBO Postdoctoral Fellow at the Senckenberg Research Institute, Frankfurt, where he worked on the physiological, ecological, and genomic underpinnings of torpor in birds and mammals. Dimitrios completed his PhD at Imperial College London, studying limits to thermal adaptation in microbes.
https://dgkontopoulos.io
Woncheol Song (2025- )
Woncheol studies the flow of resources and information through the web of social interactions. His current project aims to understand proximate and ultimate mechanisms of simultaneous interactions between multiple individuals of Argentine ants (Linepithema humile). Woncheol completed his PhD at Seoul National University where he studied the communication of carpenter ants while foraging.
Graduate students
PhD students:
Hyein Jo (Hailey) (PhD 2025-)
Hailey is interested in how Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) respond to perturbations and how the presence of inactive individuals shapes colony stability. She received her B.S. from Ewha Womans University and M.S. from Seoul National University in South Korea, where she worked on the behavioral ecology of Javan gibbons, magpies, cicadas, and ants. After graduating, she led an outreach project introducing ant foraging behavior to the public in South Korea.
Sean O’Fallon (PhD 2022- )
Sean studies the nest architecture of ant colonies, focusing on the factors that determine patterns of nest development and the impacts of nest structure on collective behavior. His current project investigates the effects of environmental conditions on the construction of nests by quantifying the nests constructed by harvester ants in lab-controlled environments.
Kaija Gahm (PhD 2021- )
Kaija is fascinated by how animals’ movements affect their social interactions, and vice versa. For her PhD, she’ll be using social network analysis to study GPS-tagged griffon vultures (Gyps fulvus), relating their movements to their social interactions in various behavioral contexts. Previously, Kaija got her B.S. at Yale, where she studied tadpoles. After graduating, she worked as a data scientist for research projects in aquatic ecology and linguistics. Her research has been inspired by hours spent watching acorn woodpeckers and backyard chickens.
https://kaijagahm.netlify.app/
Alumni
Postdocs
Emily Laub (2023- 2025) now postdoc at University of Michigan
Elvira D’Bastiani (2023- 2025) now postdoc at Cornell University
Guo Xiaohui (2021-2022) now at the Weizmann Institute, Israel
Nitika Sharma (2019-2022) now faculty of data science at U of Arizona
Julie Miller (2017-2021) now in data science
Chelsea Cook (co-advised with Brian Smith, ASU, 2016-2020) now faculty of biology at Marquette University, WI, USA
Natalie Lemanski (2018- 2020) now faculty of biology at Ramapo College, NJ, USA
Thiago Mosqueiro (2015-2018) now at Amazon
Edmund Hunt (2016-2017) now at the University of Bristol, UK
Reut Berger-Tal (2015) now at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
Graduate students
Bear Waymire (M.Sc. 2024-2026)
Alejandra Gamboa (Ph.D. 2019-2025)
Sean O’Fallon (M.Sc. 2020-2022)
Gabby Najm (M.Sc. 2018-2020)
Ana Rubio (M.Sc. 2018-2020)
Undergraduate students (who conducted independent projects)
UCLA
Cassidy Sadowski (2023 – 2025)
Lexi Schroeder (2023 – 2025)
Max Madrzyk (2020 – 2022)
Bryce Barbee (2019-2022)
Colette White (2019-2021)
Anna Weir (2019-2020)
Emily Surrell (2019-2020)
Madison Pinko (2019-2020)
Francis Evangelista (2018-2019)
Jessica Patzlaff (2019)
Kevin Neumann (2016-2019)
Artem Pashinchinskiy (2017-2019)
Maurissa Brown (2018-2019)
Emma Wan (2018)
Angela Xue (2018)
Angelika Pe (2018)
Hannah Page (2016-2017)
Melissa Peng (2016-2017)
UCSD
Brian Mi (2015-2016)
Ashley Hui (2013)