Tracy Langkilde, professor and head of the department of biology at Penn State, works at the intersection of ecology and evolution to understand how an organism's behavior and physiology are matched to its environment, and how it responds to novel selective pressures imposed by global environmental change. Her research, incorporating field and lab observations, studies the resilience and responses of native populations to rapid disruptions; it explores the impact of human-caused threats on behavior, morphology, communication, survival, stress levels, and immune function of affected species, and examines the benefits, and potential costs, of species’ adaptations to these threats.