I started my scientific path as an undergraduate student at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv
(Ukraine) in 2015. I dedicated my independent research project to environmental factors that may
predict community structure in birds of parks and forests in and outside of the urban matrix.
I successfully graduated with a Bachelor's degree in 2019 and started a Master's program, also
having a part-time job of a field scientist in the "Roztochia" Nature Reserve. My life, though,
rapidly changed when I was announced to be a Fulbright Graduate Student Program finalist in 2020, and
I moved to Norfolk, VA, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic to start my Master's program with
Dr. Eric L. Walters.
My scientific interests lay within an intersection of community ecology, data analysis,
and conservation biology. That means that I mostly spend my time (i) being adored by famous
and/or fresh papers in theoretical community ecology, i.e., species-abundance distributions and
species-area relationship, neutral theory vs. niche theory, diversity and similarity measures,
combining it with (ii) hours of coding in R and spatial analysis in QGIS, ArcGIS, and Google Earth
Engine, and (iii) thinking about using all those skills for a better protection of birds.
The project I am currently working on is dedicated to the use of functional diversity framework to
track temporal changes in spatial distribution of functional rarity within avian communities
across North America. I test the hypotheses on what the possible drivers of those changes are,
for example, land-use changes associated with urbanization, climate change, conservation efforts.
This will help to understand what is needed in order to protect the functional diversity of birds - in
other words, how to preserve ecosystem functioning in the face of extinction events.
I am currently a Ph.D. Student in Ecological Sciences at Old Dominion University and a
graduate teaching assistant in the Department of Biological Sciences.