News
2024
8/26/24 Shaopeng Wang and Pubin Hong are visiting the lab from Peking University. We are discussing species coexistence, biodiversity-ecosystem finctioning and other topics! Shaopeng has a short visit and Pubin is staying with us until the end of October.
8/10/24 Congratulations to Keila Stark from UBC who was awarded the Simons Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in Marine Microbial Ecology to work with us on phytoplankton thermal evolution! We're excited to welcome Keila to the lab next year!
8/2/24 The lab had a strong showing at the Gordon Research Conference on Unifying Ecology Across Scales. Chris, Jonas, Ashwini, Nasser, Sarah and Elena attended and presented their research.
07/25/24 Congratulations to Silas and Gabriel on their successful presentations at the KBS Undergrad Symposium! Well done!
07/10/24 Elena has a new paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution on the microbial functional rarity. This paper is from the FREE working group in France led by Cyrille Violle.
07/01/24 Congratulations to Veronica on her spectacular PhD defense and the Stanford Postdoctoral Fellowship which she will start in September! Well done Veronica!
06/14/24 Elena led a discussion session on Marine Plankton in a Changing Climate at the GRC Marine Microbes in Switzerland.
06/07/24 Elena gave two talks at the ASLO conference in Madison, WI. One of them was in the session celebrating Bob Sterner's career (see photo).
05/24/24 Carol presented her research on the Great Lakes' HAB cyanobacterial traits at the IAGLR conference in Windsor, Canada!
5/22/24 The KL-lab welcomes two REU students this summer, Silas Hicks from the Case Western Reserve University who will be working with Nasser and Gabriel Curbelo Estrella from the University of Puerto Rico who will be working with Carol.
5/15/24 Check out a wonderful write up on our Science paper by Van Savage in Cell Systems: Multilevel relations among plankton stitched together with an eco-evolutionary needle.
5/15/24 Jorge, Chris and Elena published a paper on Using neural ordinary differential equations to predict complex ecological dynamics from population density data in J Royal Society Interface.
05/14/24 Congratulations to Esther for receiving the Shaver Fellowship from MSU!
04/16/24 Congratulations to Esther for being selected to participate in the Woodstoich meeting in Germany!
04/11/24 Congratualtions to Ravi, Thomas and Chris on their new paper in Ecology Letters on the wicked Three-species problem: Incorporating competitive asymmetry and intransitivity in modern coexistence theory.
04/08/24 Congratulations to Esther for receiving the Clifford Humphrys Fellowship to support her work on zooplankton parasites and HABs!
03/01/24 Chris is teaching a globally distributed course on resource competition theory, with participants from all over the world. Check out his lecture recordings! Also, watch a dramatization of the famous discourse between G.E. Hutchinson and G. Riley on neutral theory (click on Youtube link).
02/29/24 Carol and Elena hosted a CYBORG Sea Grant project meeting at KBS on HABs in the Great Lakes. It was super fun and productive!
02/25/24 Carol received a MI Sea Grant Graduate Research Fellowship to study seasonal succession and resource competition of cyanobacteria in Lake Erie. Congratuations Carol!
02/24/24 The lab had a wonderful gathering in MI. It was great to see almost everyone in person, and not on zoom!
02/22/24 Liv and Elena gave talks at the Ocean Sciences meeting in New Orleans. Liv talked about the bacterio- and phytoplankton responses to warming at SPOT, and Elena talked about the ecosystem uncertainties and increasing the effectiveness of mCDR (marine carbon dioxide removal, e.g., through ocean fertilization).
02/16/24 Jonas, Elena and Chris published a paper in Science on Eco-evolutionary emergence of macroecological scaling in plankton communities!
02/10/24 Carol returned from a sampling trip to Kenya. She sampled Lakes Victoria and Simbi for harmful cyanobacteria.
Zoom lab meetings are going strong!
01/30/24 Congratulations to Jorge on getting a job as a Senior Environmental Scientist at the CA Department of Fish and Wildlife! We hope our collaborations will continue!
01/08/24 Nasser presented in the lab meeting on his trip to South Africa for the Plant Functional Traits course. Awesome location and research!
2023
12/18/23 Congratulations to Nasser and Carol for passing their PhD qualifying exams with flying colors!
12/15/23 Elena co-authored a paper in PNAS: "Dual thermal ecotypes coexist within a nearly genetically identical population of the unicellular marine cyanobacterium Synechococcus".
11/01/23 Elena and former postdoc Paula de Tezanos Pinto published a chapter on Algae and Cyanobacteria in Wetzel's Limnology textbook.
11/10/23 A new paper from the lab in Ecological Monographs on "Connecting local and regional scales with stochastic metacommunity models: Competition, ecological drift, and dispersal".
5/5/23 Carol was awarded the IAGLR's inaugural IDEA+ Research Scholarship! Congrats, Carol!
3/30/23 Nasser received a three-year NSF Graduate Research Fellowship! Congratulations, Nasser!
3/8/23 A new paper in Am Nat by Jonas, Thomas and Chris "A Theoretical Framework for Trait-Based Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics: Population Structure, Intraspecific Variation, and Community Assembly".
2/27/23 Congratulations to Carol on being awarded a 2023 CIGLR Graduate Research Fellowship to explore traits of HAB taxa in the Great Lakes! Well done, Carol!
2/14/23 Jonas presented in the Theoretical Ecology Seminar Series. Here is a video of his talk.
1/17/2023 Jorge Arroyo-Esquivel joins the lab as a postdoc. He will be working on data driven ecological models and community resilience.
1/10/2023 Chris, Nasser and Elena presented at the ASN Meeting in Asilomar.
2022
12/14/2022 Elena's and Mridul's paper "Are we underestimating the ecological and evolutionary effects of warming? Interactions with other environmental drivers may increase species vulnerability to high temperatures" is online in Oikos now!
12/8/22 Elena's paper "Understanding and predicting Harmful Algal Blooms in a changing climate: a trait-based framework" is published online in Limnology and Oceanography Letters.
11/17/22 Chris and Elena attended and presented at the Santa Fe Institute's workshop on scaling in biology.
11/15/22 A new paper from the lab "A general framework for species-abundance distributions: Linking traits and dispersal to explain commonness and rarity" is published in Ecology Letters!
11/1/22 Congratulations to Thomas on his new assistant professor position at the Univeristy of Lyon, France that he starts in December!
11/1/22 Yi-Chun (Liv) Yeh starts her postdoc in the lab. She will be studying microbial interactions and resilience.
10/8/22 Domiziana Cristini from Uni Konstanz, Germany is visiting the lab at Carnegie until the end of December. She'll be looking at community assembly patterns in European lakes.
9/13/22 Elena gave a keynote talk at the Aquatic Ecology Meeting of the British Ecological Society.
8/10/22 Elena is a co-author on a new paper "Potential of microbiome-based solutions for agrifood systems" published in Nature Food.
8/5/22 Chris, Elena, Jonas and Thomas presented at the Gordon Research Conference on Unifying Ecology Across Scales.
2021
11/12/21 Congratulations to Veronica Frans on her new publication on New Zealand seals in Methods in Ecology and Evolution that has been covered widely in the media (NYT, WaPo, etc.)!
10/01/21 Elena accepted a new position at the Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford, CA and will be starting there in January 2022.
8/30/21 Our NSF's Understanding the Rules of Life collaborative proposal on "Using multilayer interaction networks to predict microbiome assembly and function" got funded! We will be looking for a postdoc to apply ecological principles to the analyses of diverse datasets of gut microbiomes.
4/12/21 Ravi Ranjan successfully defended his PhD thesis and will soon start a postdoc position in Germany! Congratulations Ravi!
4/10/21: Three new grad students are joining the lab in the fall 2021. Welcome, Esther Wong, Carol Waldmann Rosenbaum and Nasser Mohammad!
2/9/21 Thomas Koffel presented his research at the International Initiative for Theoretical Ecology's online seminar series.