Bio

Cole Doolittle is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society at Oregon State University, where he studies how forests respond to wildfire, heat and drought. He earned a doctorate in biological sciences from Marquette University in 2025 and a bachelor’s degree in biology from Olivet Nazarene University. When he isn’t in the forest or working with data, Cole enjoys hiking, wildlife photography and spending time with his family.

Trained as a community ecologist, Cole is interested in how climate change and disturbance reshape forest dynamics and in making ecological science more useful to the people who manage them. His research spans scales, from how individual trees weather extremes, to how interactions among trees shift along broad environmental gradients. Much of his work is based at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest Long-Term Ecological Research and across the Pacific Northwest, where he combines long-term forest inventory data with microbial sequencing, dendrochronology and quantitative modeling to improve our understanding of forests in an era of environmental change.

Learn About Cole’s Research Project