Rate My Professor Nick Keiser

Nick Keiser serves as an Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of Florida, where he is also affiliated with the Emerging Pathogens Institute. His research program, housed in the Keiser Lab, centers on behavioral disease ecology. The lab examines how individual and social behaviors influence parasite transmission and infectious disease dynamics, with a primary focus on invertebrate hosts including spiders, ticks, flies, and snails. Keiser curates the Spider Parasite Digital Research (SPDR) Collection, a resource dedicated to the parasites and parasitoids of spiders.

Keiser's scholarly contributions include key publications such as "The keystone individual concept: an ecological and evolutionary overview" co-authored with A.P. Modlmeier and others in Animal Behaviour (2014), "Personality composition is more important than group size in determining collective foraging behaviour in the wild" in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2014), "Ethics: Open science isn’t always open to all scientists" in American Scientist (2019), "Exploring the effects of individual traits and within-colony variation on task differentiation and collective behavior in a desert social spider" in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology (2014), and "Predator and prey activity levels jointly influence the outcome of long-term foraging bouts" in Behavioral Ecology (2013). In 2025, he was awarded a collaborative National Science Foundation grant as Principal Investigator to investigate the parallel evolution of weapon complexity—venom toxins and microbial arsenals—in social predators, specifically spiders, in partnership with Dr. Timothy Colston of the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez. Keiser teaches courses such as Animal Behavior, Seminar in Animal Behavior, and Integrated Principles of Biology. Previously, he served as a postdoctoral fellow at Rice University through the Rice Academy of Fellows.