PEEC graduate student Emmy Medina-Espinoza awarded the Graduate College Dissertation Travel Grant

In Spring 2026, PEEC graduate student Emmy Medina-Espinoza was awarded the Graduate College Dissertation Travel Grant, which provides funding to support travel and fieldwork essential for doctoral dissertation research. The grant enabled Medina-Espinoza to conduct fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon, advancing her research on cockroach ecology and evolution.

 

Medina-Espinoza’s dissertation research focuses on determining how habitat and geographic factors shape tropical insect communities. By combining population genetics and landscape ecology, her work aims to assess extinction risk in cockroaches and challenge the common myth that they can survive all disturbance scenarios. By comparing communities across habitats with different disturbance histories, her research helps reveal how environmental change may affect tropical insect diversity.

 

During a three-week field season, Medina-Espinoza, Dominic Evangelista, and Aaron Goodman, all members of the Evangelista Lab, documented cockroach diversity disturbed and less-disturbed habitats across southwestern Amazonia. The team found potentially new species and gathered observations that will deepen understanding of cockroach natural history. These findings will contribute valuable insights to Medina-Espinoza’s dissertation and help clarify how disturbance may shape extinction risk in a group often assumed to be highly resilient.