Lora Richards

Dr. Lora Richards is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Nevada, Reno. She directs the Richards Lab, which investigates chemically mediated ecological interactions with a focus on plant chemistry's role in structuring ecological communities. Her multidisciplinary approach combines field studies, laboratory experiments, and spectroscopic techniques to examine fundamental ecological questions spanning trophic interactions, phytochemical diversity, and community assembly.

Her research explores how plant chemistry influences ecological niches, consumer diversity, and coevolutionary dynamics between plants and herbivores. Current projects examine phytochemical variation across environmental gradients, chemically-mediated multitrophic interactions in tropical ecosystems, and impacts of global change on plant-insect relationships. Her work integrates metabolomics with ecological theory to understand biodiversity maintenance mechanisms.

Dr. Richards' publications demonstrate consistent focus on phytochemical ecology across spatial scales, with recent work examining fire regime impacts on insect communities, intraspecific chemical variation in tropical shrubs, and cross-scale community detection methods. Her research consistently bridges chemical ecology, evolutionary biology, and conservation science.