Postdoctoral Fellowship: PRFB: You are what you eat: how anthropogenic diets shape the gut microbiome, health, and behavior of urban wildlife

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2025. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow that will contribute to biology in innovative ways. Cities are dynamic ecosystems where wildlife must navigate diverse environmental conditions shaped by human activity and land use.

This project will investigate how urbanization influences the diet, physiology, and behavior of raccoons (Procyon lotor) across different neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay Area. By examining how individual animals respond to environmental heterogeneity within cities, this research will provide new insights into the biological mechanisms that drive behavioral variation in urban wildlife.

Understanding these processes is critical for mitigating negative human-wildlife interactions and fostering coexistence in urban environments. The fellow will engage with local schools to integrate participatory science into the research process, develop educational resources on urban wildlife, and communicate findings through science outreach initiatives.

This work will generate actionable knowledge that benefits urban biodiversity conservation while promoting public engagement with urban ecosystems.

This project will examine functional links among the diet, gut microbiome, infection status, and behavior of raccoons in urban and nonurban areas with different social and ecological characteristics. By integrating molecular, ecological, and behavioral approaches, the fellow will investigate how nutritional and physiological shifts drive behavioral variation, elucidating the proximate mechanisms shaping phenotypes in urban environments.

Raccoons serve as an ideal study system due to their ubiquity in cities, providing a model for understanding how behavior is shaped by both external conditions and internal biological processes. The fellow will receive training in animal ecophysiology, behavior, and One Health frameworks while developing expertise in community-based research methodologies.

Through interdisciplinary collaboration and community engagement, this project will advance knowledge on the ecology of urban wildlife while fostering public participation in science and urban conservation.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.