Darwin’s finches under attack: studies of the Avian Vampire Fly in the Galápagos Islands of Ecuador.

Jennifer Koop grew up in La Crosse, WI along the Mississippi River. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Zoology from the University of Wisconsin, and did a semester abroad in New Zealand with UW-Stevens Point. After receiving her Bachelor’s she went to University of Utah to pursue her PhD. She began her dissertation work looking at parasite defense mechanisms in pigeons, doves, and starlings, but in her second year began work in the Galápagos Islands, on an invasive parasite of Darwin’s finches. She fell in love with the islands, their people, and their biota. She went on to an NIH funded postdoctoral fellowship at University of Arizona in Tucson where she practiced her birding skills in the Santa Rita Mountains and studied the contributions of Phainopepla to the spread of mistletoe. She accepted a position at University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth where she worked until 2019, when she moved with…