The lab is growing! We have two new PhD students, Bryson and Nakul. Bryson Loflin received his Bachelors in Biology from UNC Chapel Hill, where he was mentored by Karin Pfennig and did research on exploratory behaviors in spadefoot toads. He also worked with Matthew Zipple in Mike Sheehan’s Lab on social behavior of re-wilded mice. He is interested in understanding the evolution of cooperation and the helping decisions of vampire bats. Bryson was awarded the Robert Coker Award for his excellence in undergraduate research and he received the Centennial Fellowship in the Natural Sciences and Engineering from the Princeton Graduate School.
Nakul Wewhare received his Bachelors and Masters simultaneously at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Pune, India. Nakul has an impressive foundation of research experience in bioacoustics across a range of species. He is broadly interested in animal vocal communication and particularly interested in vocal sequences. His Masters thesis examined how social interactions influence vocal learning in parrots. He has also developed interesting new methods for the analysis of marmoset vocal sequences. You can read an interview with Nakul here.
We also have two staff members. We hired Kelly Mitzel as a lab manager and research assistant. Kelly has a Masters degree in Biology, a Bachelor degrees in both Biology (with a minor in mathematics) and English Literature (with a minor in professional writing). She worked with Angela Freeman to measure oxytocin and vasopressin receptor densities in vampire bat brains and has led field research on bats with Joy O’Keefe. She has a special interest in how environmental pollutants impact hormones and behavior.
Tobias Nguyen joined our lab as intern after graduating from Princeton in 2024, and he’s now working as a full-time research assistant. He’s testing whether pairwise social preference tests in a Y-maze reflect the same social network structure as the more traditional observations of an entire group. He’s also mapping social grooming relationships to help us investigate the effects of social relationships on immune function and epigenetic aging.
In 2026, we will be joined by at least two new postdocs, Shailee Shah and Sam Walmsley. Shailee will be working on cooperation and social structure in African Superb Starlings. Sam will be working on the causes and consequences of changes in social network structure in vampire bats and other species. Some other news:
- Postdoc May Dixon received the 2026 Anthony G. Coates 3-Year Postdoctoral Fellowship.
- Julia Vrtilek’s first PhD chapter Vocal convergence during formation of social relationships in vampire bats was accepted for publication in Proceedings B.
- Raven Hartman joined Angela Salles Lab at the University of Illinois Chicago.
- A collaborative grant from the National Science Foundation entitled Tracking pathogen sharing across a vampire bat-cattle contact network was awarded to a team including me, Sebastian Stockmaier, Daniel Becker, and Meggan Craft.
Carter Lab 