Drew Suchomel - "Elemental composition of cichlids in Lake Tanganyika"
"Instead of my sampling being restricted to relatively small number of samples and to only a few species of fish, this funding makes it possible to scale up the size of my dataset in order to answer larger questions that could even capture patterns present at a lake-wide scale."
Drew Suchomel, Ph.D. Student
2026 Recipient of the Biodiversity Institute Graduate Student Excellence Grant
Program in Ecology and Evolution
Graduate Advisor: Katie Wagner
Background
I’m studying how the chemistry of life shapes biodiversity in one of the most iconic evolutionary systems on Earth, cichlid fishes from Lake Tanganyika. By analyzing the full suite of elements (“ionomes”) in over hundred fish across dozens of species, I’m asking a simple but powerful question: what determines the elemental composition of organisms? Is it their environment, their evolutionary history, or both? Using cutting-edge elemental analysis and phylogenetic methods, this work links chemistry, ecology, and evolution to better understand how biodiversity is created, and how it is linked to larger ecosystem processes like nutrient cycling.
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