Matt Barbour, PhD (he/him)

Assistant professor

Matt is an evolutionary community ecologist and leader of the Barbour Lab. He is an Assistant Professor at the Université de Sherbrooke since 2022. He earned his MSc from San Diego State University and his PhD from the University of British Columbia before completing his postdoc at the University of Zurich. He got hooked on ecology while studying the behavioral ecology of vertebrates, but was lured away by the relative tractability and fascinating biology of plants and insects. He is training members of the Barbour Lab how to integrate tools from diverse fields (e.g., genomics, molecular biology, and food-web theory) to better understand the interconnected nature of biodiversity across scales.

Languages: English (native) and learning French fast!

Cintia Pérez, BSc (she/her)

MSc Student

Cintia is currently pursuing her MSc in Ecology in the Barbour Lab after completing her BSc at the Autonomous University of the State of Morelos in Mexico. During her BSc, she used bioinformatics to study the molecular pathways by which tomatoes defend themselves from viral infection. She is passionate about conserving biodiversity and is excited to apply her skills in bioinformatics to advance our understanding of food-web interactions. For her MSc project, she is conducting greenhouse and growth chamber experiments with plants from the Arabidopsis 1001 Genomes Project to study how plant genomic variation influences food-chain dynamics (i.e. plant-aphid-parasitoid interactions).

Languages: Spanish (native), English, and learning French.

Nanouk Abbonenc

Research Credits

Bio coming soon!

Frédérick St-Pierre

Research Credits

Bio coming soon!

Geneviève Arsenault

Research Credits

Bio coming soon!

Isabel Ramírez

COOP Intern

Isa is currently studying biology at the Université de Sherbrooke.  She has also been training professionally as a scientific illustrator through the Spanish academy Illustraciencia and has worked with research teams at Mexico's National Polytechnic Institute. Fascinated by the complexity of inter-species relationships and genetics, Isa is doing a COOP internship in the Barbour Lab. She is learning how to integratively study genetics and species interactions, assisting with current research, and developing scientific illustrations of the laboratory's research.

Languages: Spanish (native), English, French and Italian.

Sandrine L’Anglais-Landry

COOP Intern

Sandrine is a third-year student completing her BSc in Biology at the Université de Sherbrooke. She is driven by a passion for understanding the intricate of evolutionary ecology of plants and animals as well as their conservation. Having successfully completed three internships, her latest experience involved working in the Barbour Lab as a COOP intern where she used the greenhouse’s new automated plant-phenotyping system to identify hyperspectral signatures in chemical defenses (glucosinates) produced by Arabidopsis thaliana.

Languages: French (native) and English.

Katerie Bessette

Research Credits

Katerie completed her BSc in Biology at the Université de Sherbrooke while earning research credits in the Barbour lab. Her drive to understand the mechanisms underlying environmental change has led her to the field of ecology. During her time in the lab, she studied the population dynamics of aphids, conducting growth chamber experiments with multiple species and genetic clones.

Languages: French (native) and English.

This could be you!

We are recruiting graduate students to join our group of ecologists in the Department of Biology at the Université de Sherbrooke.