Chandreyee Mitra ’01, trustee
Biologist Chandreyee Mitra ’01 has been a dedicated fan of College of the Atlantic since she attended school there back in the late 1990s. She was part of the first crew of students to spend a summer on Great Duck Island, where she researched Herring Gulls, an experience that she credits with shaping her subsequent passion for scientific research. “I love COA as an institution and firmly believe in its mission and vision,” she says.
Mitra takes a whole-organism and interdisciplinary approach to her research, using tools from animal behavior, physiology, anatomy, and evolutionary biology. The central goal of her work is to explore how observed behavioral and physiological traits are affected by changes in environmental variables.
An associate professor of biology at North Central College, where she has taught since 2015, Mitra probes these areas using two very different animal systems—field crickets and butterflies.
“My work with field crickets has focused on the idea that adaptive phenotypic plasticity is one way for species to persist in variable environments,” she says. “Specifically, I have examined aspects of the environmentally mediated life-history trade-off between flight and reproduction in different polyphenic morphs.”
Through her parallel work with swallowtail butterflies, Mitra has focused on the costs and benefits of male nuptial gift giving. In many butterfly and moth species, males take in salt from the environment and transfer it to females during mating. Mitra’s work examines how salt availability affects male behavior and fitness, and how variation in male-provided salt affects the fitness of females and their offspring.
She writes, “Human activity is changing the abiotic environments of many extant species, and how a species responds to such changes may affect its persistence in a changing world. One nearly instantaneous way animals can respond to changes in their environment is by changing their behavior. Therefore, my students and I have been working on how organisms adjust their behavior based on the surroundings they happen to find themselves in.”
As part of that first crew on Great Duck, at what would become the Alice Eno Field Research Station, Mitra credits her time at COA with sparking a lifelong passion for scientific research.
“My time on Great Duck, especially doing research with John Anderson, helped me find my path to becoming a researcher working in animal behavior. And that eventually led to my seeking a position teaching at a small liberal arts school where, like John did for me and so many, I could introduce undergraduates to the wonders of scientific research.”
Mitra holds a PhD and an MS from the University of Nebraska School of Biological Sciences. Previous to her current appointment at North Central, she served as assistant professor of biology and coordinator of the environmental studies program there. She has been a National Institutes of Health Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Award Fellow, a graduate teaching and research assistant at the University of Nebraska, a field assistant at the University of California Hastings Natural History Reservation, and a wildlife biologist at the Lassen National Forest. Her research has been published in Animal Behavior and Ecological Entomology. Mitra has presented numerous times at the Animal Behavior Society Annual Meeting, the National Conference on Undergraduate Research, and the Midwest Ecology and Evolution Conference, among others.
Public outreach efforts are a big part of Mitra’s career. She helped celebrate Monarch Madness at the Growing Place, coordinates Project BudBurst at North Central, and has organized display tables at the Insect Festival, the WonderLab Museum of Science, Health and Technology, and University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, among other efforts. She is a member of the Animal Behavior Society, the Association for Biology Laboratory Education, Sigma Xi, the Society for the Study of Evolution, and the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science.
