Advancing knowledge
and equity
in parasitology
🐌 Host – parasite interactions 🪱
🧬 Molecular biology
🖥 Bioinformatics
📊 Data visualization
📰 News
July 2025 - The lab traveled to the 100th annual conference to the American Society of Parasitology! Everyone had a great time presenting posters, giving talks, and gourging on seafood. Congrats to
Chase,
Avery,
Helen,
Saige,
Sonja , and
Sophie for their travel awards and successful poster presentations.





July 2025 - We are very excited and proud to release a major original research paper, Quantitative ethology of schistosome miracidia characterizes a conserved snail peptide that inhibits penetration. This is the culmination of over 3 years of work and a 7 year vision and goal of better understanding the idiosyncratic behaviors that schistosome miracidia exhibit while sensing their intermediate host snails. We built a lot of novel, cutting-edge tech and code to make this happen, and we’re excited to release it to the world! It was truly a lab-wide effort, with 8 Wheeler Lab students (past and present) contributing as authors. Congratulations to all!
March 2025 - A big week for the Wheeler Lab! After authoring her first peer-reviewed publication, we’ve now learned that
Rachel has received the prestigious Goldwater Scholarship. Rachel was one of 441 recipients (3 from UWEC!!!) out of a pool 1,350 science, engineering, and mathematics nominees. This is a huge achievement, and we’re so proud of Rachel! Read more about the award here.
August 2024 - We are incredibly excited and grateful to receive funding from the NIH’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The >$300,000 R15 grant will support undergraduate research in the Wheeler Lab for the next 3 years!
June 2024 - ASP Round 2 for the Wheeler Lab 🥼 The lab traveled to Denver to present research on schistosomes, mosquitoes, and new software developed by undergraduate students.
Chase’s dance moves will live in ASP infamy 🕺🏻






(The science was good too.)
April 2024 - The lab’s first Celebration of Research + Creative Activity at UWEC. Very fun for the lab to present three posters on Flatworm sensory behaviors, sensation, and wrmXpress! 


October 2023 - Nic received recognition as a featured scholar at UWEC’s annual Celebration of Scholarship. Dr. Jenn Smith from the biology department was also featured.
July 2023 - The Wheeler Lab went to ASP! Very excited to introduce preliminary work on intestinal parasites of California ground squirrels and to make valuable connections in the field. We’ll be back next year in Denver!

June 2023 - The official Wheeler Lab logo is introduced to the wild! Shoutout to
Maggie for the design 💯
January 2023 - The final chemogenomic screening manuscript is published in Communications Biology.
November 2022 - The final wrmXpress manuscript is published in PLOS NTD.
August 2022 - Our review with the Zamanian (UW-Madison) and Hallem (UCLA) labs is published in Trends in Parasitology.
July 2022 - New preprint on multivariate screening for macrofilaricide discovery.
July 2022 - See you at ASP! Nic will be traveling to College Station for the American Society of Parasitologists annual meeting.
He’ll be giving a talk in the Genomics & Molecular Biology session on Monday afternoon, July 11. Slides are available at asp2022.wheelerlab.bio
May 2022 - Nic and the Zamanian lab at UW-Madison release a new software package called wrmXpress.
December 2021 - It’s official, the Wheeler Lab is set to open at UWEC in August 2022!
Prospective student researcher?
Contact
Email: wheelenj@uwec.edu
Office Phone: 715-836-3021
Office: 345 Phillips Hall
Office Hours: M 2-4p, Th 11a-12p