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Christy McCain of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the CU Museum of Natural History and Jamie Nagle of Physics have been recognized with 2024-25 Distinguished Research Lectureships.

The Lectureship is among the most esteemed honors bestowed by the faculty upon a faculty member at CU Boulder. Each year, the  solicits nominations from faculty for the Distinguished Research Lectureship, and a faculty review panel recommends one faculty member as a recipient. Two faculty members were selected for the 2024—25 academic year.

Christy McCain (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; CU Museum of Natural History)

Christy McCain (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; CU Museum of Natural History)

Christy McCain is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and curator of vertebrates in the CU Museum of Natural History.

McCain received dual bachelor’s degrees in wildlife biology and studio art from Humboldt State University, was a natural resources & protected areas specialist in the Peace Corps Honduras, and then completed her doctorate in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Kansas.

She was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis at UC Santa Barbara prior to her assistant professorship at CU Boulder in 2008.

McCain studies how montane organisms are distributed on mountains around the world, and how those populations and species are influenced by human land use and climate change. Her research spans topics across ecology and evolution to understand and conserve biodiversity.

Funded by the National Science Foundation through several grants, her research has appeared in over 60 peer reviewed journals, including Science, Ecology Letters, Ecology and Global Change Biology among others.

McCain is the curator of the Vertebrate Collections in the CU Museum of Natural History where she is a steward for the continued protection and use of museum specimens for understanding and conserving the world’s biodiversity. She also teaches Mammalogy as well as various classes over the years in field biology, creative conservation messaging, and mountain ecology and conservation.

Jamie Nagle (Physics)

Jamie Nagle (Physics)

Jamie Nagle is a professor in the Department of Physics.

Nagle received his bachelor’s degree in physics, with a minor in political science, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. He earned his doctorate in physics from Yale University.    

He was a postdoctoral scientist and then, a year later, an assistant professor at Columbia University before joining the faculty at CU Boulder in 2003.   

Nagle is interested in the nuclear physics interactions that dominated the earliest universe, just microseconds after the big bang. He studies this early-universe matter—made of subatomic particles, quarks and gluons—in the laboratory by creating tiny droplets of this substance at large accelerator facilities in the U.S and Europe.

Funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science through several grants including an Outstanding Junior Investigator award, his research has appeared in over 700 peer reviewed journals, including Nature Physics, Physical Review Letters, and Genetics.

Nagle has served on the U.S. Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, the Brookhaven Program Advisory Committee and as Lead Referee on the Large Hadron Collider Committee. He has also been an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, Nordea Bank Visiting Scholar, Fellow of the American Physical Society, and Co-Spokesperson for the PHENIX Experiment. He is currently Run Coordinator for the PHENIX Experiment. In his spare time, Jamie is a marathon runner and has completed all the world marathon majors.