Rate My Professor Stella Uiterwaal

Stella Uiterwaal is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis. She previously served as a postdoctoral fellow at the institution from 2022 to 2024, with mentorship from Stephen Blake of Saint Louis University, Sharon Deem of the Saint Louis Zoo, and Anthony Dell of the National Great Rivers Research and Education Center. Her work centers on the Forest Park Living Lab project, examining the movement ecology of wildlife across trophic levels, including owls, turtles, raccoons, and other species in urban environments.

Uiterwaal holds a Ph.D. in Biology with a specialization in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, completed between 2018 and 2022, as well as a B.Sc. in Biology from the same university. As a community ecologist, her research specializes in predator-prey interactions, combining experimental and field-based approaches to understand their causes and consequences. She has contributed to publications including the 2024 paper "The global diet diversity spectrum in avian apex predators" in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the 2024 paper "Insights into the spatial ecology of severely injured free-living felids" in Ecology and Evolution, and the 2025 paper "Reduced thermoregulatory ability contributes to increased mortality in urban box turtles" in the Journal of Thermal Biology. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Giraffe Conservation Foundation. Professional Email: null