Ralph A. Saporito, Ph.D. 
Associate Professor
​Graduate Program Director
Department of Biology
John Carroll University

Office: Dolan W211
Lab: Dolan W108 & W110

Ph: 216.397.4492
E-mail: rsaporito@jcu.edu
Graduate Students

Noemi Becza

Olivia Brooks
Noemi graduated with a B.S. in Biology from John Carroll in 2017. As an undergraduate, she studied alkaloid defenses in the dendrobatid frog Oophaga granulifera from Costa Rica. She also studied alkaloid detection in dendrobatid frogs. She began the M.S. program in Fall 2017, and is interested in examining how alkaloid defenses in dendrobatid poison frogs may inhibit chytrid fungus and how this relates their skin microbiome.
Olivia graduated with a B.S. in Biology from Ohio University in 2018. She began the M.S. program at John Carroll University in Fall 2018, and has been working on a project to describe maternal provisioning of alkaloid defenses in the granulated poison frog Oophaga granulifera from Costa Rica. For her thesis research, she plans to study the effects of natural alkaloid variation on maternal provisioning in mothers and tadpoles of the strawberry poison frog Oophaga pumilio in Costa Rica and Panama.

Nelson Rivera
Nelson graduated from Siena College with a B.S. in Biology in 2016. As an undergraduate, he conducted research on the community structure of glass frogs in a lowland tropical rainforest in Costa Rica. He began the M.S. program at John Carroll in Fall 2017, and for his thesis research, he is studying the distribution of alkaloid defenses in the skin of the green and black poison frog Dendrobates auratus from Costa Rica.
Undergraduate Students

Ashley Brooks

Sophie Kocheff
Ashley is a junior Biology major at JCU. She joined the lab in Fall 2017 and is currently in charge of our tropical frog collection - in particular, she is working to catalouge new specimens and maintain old specimens. She was awarded a 2018 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) from JCU, and is currently describing alkaloid variation among populations of Oophaga granulifera and Oophaga pumilio from Costa Rica.
Sophie is a senior Biology major at JCU. She joined the lab in Fall 2016 and is working on a project to further understand how differences in the alkaloid defenses of poison frogs are perceived by arthropod predators. She was awarded a 2017 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) from JCU to study differences in alkaloid palatability in Central and South American dendrobatid frogs. Sophie is also in charge of caring for the labs captive poison frog colony.

Koary Lutz

Nina Savastano
Koary is a senior Cell and Molecular Biology major at JCU. He joined the lab in Spring 2017 and worked with undergraduate Andrew Britton on two experiments with the dendrobatid frog Dendrobates tinctorius - one to determine if frogs are capable of detecting alkaloid-containing prey and another to determine if frogs exhibit anti predator behaviors in response to simulated predation. He was awarded a Summer 2018 Barrett Award from JCU to study differences in palatability between the green and black poison frog Dendrobates auratus and the red-eyed tree frog Agalychnis callidryas.
Nina is a freshman Environmental Science major at JCU. She joined the lab in Fall 2019 and​ is working on a research project to determine if the yellow-striped poison frog, Dendrobates truncatus, exhibits anti predator behaviors in response to simulated predation. She was recently awarded a Summer Undergraduate Fellowship (SURF) from JCU and will study the distribution of alkaloid defenses in the skin of the green and black poison frog Dendrobates auratus from Costa Rica in Summer 2019.
Visiting Students

Adriana Jeckel
​Adriana is a PhD candidate from the Graduate Program in Zoology of University of São Paulo, Brazil and her research focuses mainly on chemical defense of poison frogs and its ecological and evolutionary implications. Currently, her PhD research aims to understand some of the mechanisms that allow poison frogs to sequester alkaloids.