Pamela Yeh

About

Pamela Yeh is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA. Her research focuses on measuring, understanding, and predicting the ecological and evolutionary trajectories of populations when they encounter novel environments, especially those with multiple disturbances or stressors. Her work investigates how stressors interact and how these interactions ultimately affect populations. She incorporates field, laboratory, and theoretical tools in her research, working on two systems: one lab-based, involving microbial evolution and bacterial responses to antibiotics as stressors, and one field-based, studying avian urban ecology and evolution, specifically on how dark-eyed juncos and house sparrows are affected by urban landscapes and stressors.

Research topics

• Biology
• Ecology
• Demography
• Genetics
• Evolutionary biology
• Environmental planning
• Chromatography
• Microbiology
• Chemistry
• Optics

Selected publications

• Estimating microbial population data from optical density

  PLoS ONE · 2022 · 152 citations

  The spectrophotometer has been used for decades to measure the density of bacterial populations as the turbidity expressed as optical density-OD. However, the OD alone is an unreliable metric and is only proportionately accurate to cell titers to about an OD of 0.1. The relationship between OD and cell titer depends on the configuration of the spectrophotometer, the length of the light path through the culture, the size of the bacterial cells, and the cell culture density. We demonstrate the imp…

  DOI

• Compounding Effects of Climate Warming and Antibiotic Resistance

  iScience · 2020 · 135 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Bacteria have evolved diverse mechanisms to survive environments with antibiotics. Temperature is both a key factor that affects the survival of bacteria in the presence of antibiotics and an environmental trait that is drastically increasing due to climate change. Therefore, it is timely and important to understand links between temperature changes and selection of antibiotic resistance. This review examines these links by synthesizing results from laboratories, hospitals, and environmental stu…

  DOI

• Rapid evolutionary divergence of a songbird population following recent colonization of an urban area

  Molecular Ecology · 2022 · 15 citations

  Colonization of a novel environment by a few individuals can lead to rapid evolutionary change, yet there is scarce evidence of the relative contributions of neutral and selective factors in promoting divergence during the early stages of colonization. Here we explore the role of neutral and selective forces in the divergence of a unique urban population of the dark-eyed junco (Junco hyemalis), which became established on the campus of the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) in the earl…

  PublisherDOI

• Urban birds become less fearful following COVID-19 reopenings

  Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences · 2023-08-23 · 13 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Following the COVID-19 pandemic, many people around the world stayed home, drastically altering human activity in cities. This exceptional moment provided researchers the opportunity to test how urban animals respond to human disturbance, in some cases testing fundamental questions on the mechanistic impact of urban behaviours on animal behaviour. However, at the end of this 'anthropause', human activity returned to cities. How might each of these strong shifts affect wildlife in the short and l…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Meta-analysis of three-stressor combinations on population-level fitness reveal substantial higher-order interactions

  The Science of The Total Environment · 2022-12-23 · 12 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Although natural populations are typically subjected to multiple stressors, most past research has focused on single-stressor and two-stressor interactions, with little attention paid to higher-order interactions among three or more stressors. However, higher-order interactions increasingly appear to be widespread. Consequently, we used a recently introduced and improved framework to re-analyze higher-order ecological interactions. We conducted a literature review of the last 100 years (1920-202…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Van M. Savage

  University of California, Los Angeles

  60 shared

• Eleanor S. Diamant

  32 shared

• Natalie Lozano-Huntelman

  University of California, Los Angeles

  26 shared

• Elif Tekin

  Anadolu University

  19 shared

• Mauricio Cruz‐Loya

  Stanford University

  15 shared

• Sada Boyd

  University of California, Los Angeles

  13 shared

• Tina Manzhu Kang

  University of California, Los Angeles

  11 shared

• Ian MacGregor‐Fors

  University of Helsinki

  11 shared

Labs

• Yeh LabPI

Education

• B.A., Environmental Science

  University of California, Berkeley

  2002

• M.A., Environmental Science

  University of California, Berkeley

  2004

• Ph.D., Environmental Science

  University of California, Berkeley

  2009

Similar researchers at University of California, Los Angeles

• Lawren Sackh-95
• H. Bradley Shafferh-80
• Glen MacDonaldh-79