Richard Lehtinen

Department/Affiliation: Biology
Phone: 330-263-2271
Office Address: 206 Mateer
Email: rlehtinen@wooster.edu
Web Site: Super Salamander Research

Degrees

• B.S., Winona 1995
• M.S., Minnesota 1997
• Ph.D., Michigan 2003

Courses Taught   

• BIOL 100: Human Ecology
• BIOL 202: Gateway to Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
• BIOL 311: Natural History of Vertebrates
• BIOL 360: Evolution
• BIOL 401: Junior Independent Study/Biostatistics

Projects in Progress

I currently have two main projects that are my primary focus. The first project revolves around trying to assess species boundaries in plant-breeding frogs from Madagascar using data from DNA and morphology. Previous work identified several lineages of frogs from Madagascar that are likely new species to science. I have now completed about half of the measurements needed to make possible a full taxonomic revision of this group of frogs in collaboration with Dr. Miguel Vences at the Technical University of Braunschweig (Germany) and Dr. Christopher Raxworthy at the American Museum of Natural History.

My second main project involves frogs from Trinidad and Tobago. I am nearing completion of a paper comparing different sources of data in making taxonomic decisions in frog systematics (using an example from poison frogs from these islands). A new project on parental care in a glassfrog from Tobago will be initiated this summer and carried out on my leave in spring 2010. This project will also have an evolutionary component as I hope to generate DNA sequences for this species in an effort to understand how it came to be in Tobago. I will be collaborating on this project with Dr. Adrian Hailey at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine.