Meet Our Staff

About

Alex studied Biology with a focus in Fish and Wildlife Management at Montana State University, Bozeman where he graduated magna cum laude in 2003. During his summers in Montana, Alex worked for Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks on Westslope cutthroat trout recovery efforts. After graduating, he pursued his passion for teaching and climbing around the world for four years, living and working in 5 different countries on three continents. He returned to the USA in 2007 to work as an ice climbing and glacier guide in Alaska, before he began a M.S. program in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology at the University of Nevada, Reno. For his thesis research, he examined movement patterns, habitat use, and survival of Lahontan cutthroat trout in the Truckee River.

While in Reno, Alex was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Science Partners Fellow, enabling him to assist local high school AP Biology courses with their lab programs. After graduating with his M.S. in 2010, Alex worked for the USFWS in Reno and the Lake Tahoe area on native species conservation and restoration efforts and taught Wilderness Survival Courses at Truckee Meadows Community College before coming Cornell to pursue his PhD in the Natural Resources Department with dissertation research focusing on fisheries and aquatic ecology, water resource issues, statistical and spatial modelling and mapping using GIS, and stream biogeochemistry.

Alex spent the for 2014-2015 academic year as Fulbright Fellow in Ecuador conducting research on the flow-ecology and effects of water withdrawals on the aquatic fauna in Napo River Basin. Alex completed his PhD at Cornell University in May then spent this summer as an invited faculty instructor at the Central South University of Forestry and Technology in Changsha, China. He started at Heritage University as an Assistant Professor of Environmental Science in Fall 2015.

Since arriving at Heritage, Dr. Alexiades has published several peer-reviewed scientific articles and serves as the Principal Investigator for the NSF i-NATURE https://www.heritage-inature.org/ and First Nations MESA programs to increase STEM opportunities for Native American students. He has a passion for social justice and creating pathways to higher education for underrepresented minorities. Alex is also a competitive ultra-endurance mountain bike racer for Chumba Cycles USA (https://www.chumbausa.com/riders/) and Wanderlust Gear (www.wanderlustgearusa.com) and a Contributing Editor at Bikepacker Magazine (www.bikepacker.com) and gives talk all over the world about his science and exploration.