Ashley House

PhD Student, Ecology and Evolutiom

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program

Ashley House joined the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook in Fall 2025. Prior to SBU, she attended Columbia University, where she earned her B.A. in Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology and gained research experience in geochemistry and paleoecology. Ashley remains interested in testing hypotheses about how changing climate and environments impact niche partitioning and food web (in)stability in vertebrate communities across time in East Africa. To do so, she utilizes the fossil record of the Turkana Basin, Kenya to create paleoecological and paleoenvironmental reconstructions throughout the Cenozoic, investigating how the restructuring of herbivore and carnivore dietary niche spaces correspond to major environmental transitions.

Through the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), Ashley aims to advance her research modeling the ecological evolution of the Turkana Basin. By expanding her focus to understudied vertebrate groups, she seeks to better illuminate the origins of modern eastern African ecosystems and their resilience in the face of contemporary climate change. Furthermore, she looks forward to utilizing this opportunity to mentor Stony Brook University undergraduates in paleoecological analyses, fostering their engagement with the broader geological and ecological research communities.

As part of her upcoming fellowship experience, Ashley will begin her fieldwork this summer in the Turkana Basin of Kenya, visiting the fossil sites that have been central to her research since her undergraduate years. Her work will involve collaborating with museum collections in both Turkana and Nairobi to collect fossilized enamel samples. These samples will be used for stable isotopic analyses back on the SBU campus in the fall, providing the foundational data and insights necessary to develop her dissertation and understand the climatic history of the region.