Dr. Amanda Stahlke

Scientific Advisor for RiversEdge West 

Amanda Stahlke, PhD has been studying tamarisk beetles for over a decade. She started genetic monitoring of tamarisk beetles as an undergraduate researcher with Zeynep Ozsoy at Colorado Mesa University. She supported biocontrol field monitoring and experiments at the Palisade Insectary with Dan Bean and CABI in Switzerland before earning a PhD in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Idaho, where she developed genomic techniques to study rapid evolution in tamarisk beetles. She is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Colorado Mesa University, where her research on tamarisk beetles and their genomes continues.  

In her role as scientific advisor for RiversEdge West, she helps connect academic and governmental research on biocontrol and on-the-ground practice. She curates the iNaturalist observations of tamarisk beetles for the Annual REW Beetle Map, is Co-PI on an APHIS-funded project to monitor tamarisk beetles, their hybrids, and their impact on southwestern willow flycatchers, and supports the genetic identification of SWFL in potentially overlapping ranges.