Our Mission:
The Bitterroot Community Science Center exists to engage our community in learning about local wildlife and the importance of ecological stewardship through hands-on participation in local research projects. We want to help everyone discover just how fun and rewarding science can be!
Our Programs:
The Center’s goal is to serve as a community resource for experience-based learning and discovery. One way we do this is by collaborating with local elementary and high school classrooms to develop customized science curricula built around our local research projects. Our online classroom resources allow participating classrooms to explore data on individual animals in our field studies (body size, sex, age, morphological traits, genetic profiles, home range size, microhabitat use, movement patterns, diet composition, etc.). Working with their teachers, students develop questions about our study animals, propose hypotheses, and design research projects to test their predictions using our data.
We also offer structured field courses designed to introduce high school and college students to local wildlife and ecosystems. Students enrolled in our field courses will get to explore the natural history of local species, learn basic field ecology techniques (animal tracking, trapping, radio telemetry, tissue collection, etc.), and develop proper laboratory methods (genetic and proteomic analysis). Following completion of the field course, interested students are invited to earn co-authorship on resulting publications by assisting with analysis of the data collected and preparation of the manuscript.
Meet the Team
Eric graduated from Loma Linda University, where he investigated environmental and genetic factors influencing venom composition in rattlesnakes. After graduate school, he completed a research fellowship at Instituto Butantan in Sao Paulo, Brazil looking at the biochemistry of pit viper venoms. His other areas of research include population ecology, animal behavior, and pharmaceutical applications of venom proteins. Eric is a biology instructor at the University of Montana-Bitterroot College and serves as the director of venomics research for the Asclepius Snakebite foundation.