Research Asst. Professor, Marine Sciences, Univ. of North Carolina - Chapel Hill (2003-2017); Postdoctoral fellow, MPI – Marine Microbiology, Bremen, Germany (2000-2003); Research assistant and postdoctoral associate, Civil Engineering Dept., Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill. (1994-1999); PhD, Bacteriology, University of Wisconsin - Madison (1994); BS (1984) and MS (1986), Biology and Marine Microbiology, University of Massachusetts - Boston.
Research projects include: new methods to directly link species identity with carbon source utilization; direct profiling of microbial communities without PCR; direct detection of microbial enzymes in environmental samples.
Oceanographer with a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA and currently Assistant Professor of Zoology at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. Research interests include benthic ecology, trophic ecology and systematics, with special focus on taxonomy of annelid polychaetes.
Thulani Makhalanyane is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry, Genetics and Microbiology and undertakes research at the Centre for Microbial Ecology and Genomics. His research has focused almost entirely on understanding the ecology of microbial communities in extreme environments.
Dr. Marquet is a Chilean Ecologist, known for his contributions in the fields of macroecology, theoretical ecology, conservation, and global change, and author of 190 publications including three books. Early in his carrier he started working on the quest for general principles underlying the complexity of ecological systems that contributed to the disciplines of metabolic ecology and ecological scaling. His work on the relationship between the size of organisms and their abundance proved to be of great generality as well as his work on the evolution of body size on landmasses; connecting body size to area, evolution, and fitness. He pioneered the development of Metapopulation models in dynamic landscapes uniting concepts from epidemiology and ecology and the emergence of power laws in ecological systems, being among the first to provide empirical evidence of Self-Organized Criticality in ecological systems using the extinction record of birds in Hawaii. In parallel, he carried important work on the conservation of vertebrate species and on the impact of climate change in the Americas and Europe. His current work focuses on the emergence of ecological diversity, the drivers and consequences of human cultural complexity and the integration of theories in ecology. He is member of the Chilean National Academy of Science, a former Guggenheim Fellow and member of the science board of several national and international organizations.
I am an Associate Professor and researcher at Botany Area of the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemical Engineering at Pablo de Olavide University (Seville, Spain). I am a botanist but I also like to define myself as an evolutionary biologist. My final objective is to contribute to the knowledge and conservation of the biodiversity that surrounds us. My main research interests are on systematics and evolution of angiosperms. I try to answer questions related with the topics of when, how and why are species (and in general biodiversity) generated. I am also very interested in biogeography, this is, explaining the processes causing the distribution of species. To accomplish these task, I use multidisciplinar approaches ranging from classic taxonomy to molecular phylogenetics, estimation of divergence times, cytogenetic evolution, phylo- and biogeographic analyses. Finally, I am also interested in conservation biology, particularly in relation with conservation genetics. I am also the curator of UPOS herbarium
My research aims at understanding the eco-evolutionary pathways that lead to emergence and dispersal of zoonotic and human pathogens, with emphasis on land use and climate change, within the One Health approach. I employ genomics, metagenomics and phylodynamics as tools to elucidate the evolutionary processes and population dynamics that shape viral genetic diversity both at the inter-host (epidemics) and in intra-host level (individual infections).
Biodiversity Scientist, Evolutionary Ecologist, Marine Biologist, Natural Historian.
Dr. Fernanda Michalski is Associate Professor of Ecology and Conservation of Vertebrates at the Federal University of Amapá, Macapá, Brazil. Member of the British Ecological Society. Her research focuses on understanding the effects of anthropogenic disturbance on Neotropical mid sized and large-bodied vertebrates. She is particularly interested in ecology and conservation of mammals, and in understanding human-wildlife conflicts in the Brazilian Amazon.
Dr. Andrew Mitchell is a Senior Research Scientist at the Australian Museum Research Institute. His research interests include systematics of noctuid moths (Lepidoptera), molecular phylogenetics, insect diversity, species delimitation and diagnostics, and DNA barcoding.
I am a palaeobiologist interested in unravelling the biology and evolutionary dynamics of extinct small mammal taxa, particularly on lagomorphs. During my early career, I have developed models for reconstructing the size of past small mammals, and the use cutting-edge palaeontological techniques (e.g. palaeohistology) for disentangling their biology and evolutionary history. These studies allow me to establish the first long-term database of evolutionary responses of small mammals to insularity, being useful for conservation purposes of extant ones. Besides, I am an active researcher in outreaching (articles, workshops, media interviews, exhibition curator, social and outreaching projects, etc.), to bring science to society and to spread my results. At present, my research lines are focused on determination of the evolutionary and ecological dynamics of extinct lagomorphs to past climate and environmental changes, identifying the drivers, biological shifts and extinction rates. In fact, revealing how this family evolved to past environmental changes will contribute to the development of more effective conservationist strategies and policies for threatened extant taxa, helping, hence, in the present and future ecosystem management and protection
Senior Researcher at the Theoretical and Experimental Ecology Station, CNRS, at Moulis, France. Leader of the Ecological Networks and Global Change Research Group.
Dr. Petteri Muukkonen is a senior lecturer in geoinformatics. He is a geographer, and specifically owns a strong background in biogeography and in geoinformatics. He has mainly studied various biogeography and forestry themes in the boreal forest environment. For example, Dr. Muukkonen has studied carbon sequestration and carbon cycle, biomass surveys and monitoring, spatial autocorrelation of soil characteristics, landscape fragmentation, habitat changes and remote sensing of forest landscape. Geoinformatics (GIS and remote sensing) has been present in some way in all of his research topics.