My research is motivated by the broad question of how to best maintain biodiversity on Earth. I focus on how biodiversity is generated, maintained, or destroyed by the interaction among organisms. My approach is interdisciplinary, combining biological experiments and empirical data with mathematics, statistics, and computer science. Key questions include how species respond to climate change, why species go extinct, and how invasive species spread. More technically, I study dynamics in space and time of natural systems, at two levels of biological organization - populations and communities. I develop theory in the form of mathematical models and connect these models to empirical data, which involves also developing new statistical and computational methods. Many important questions about biodiversity have two conspicuous features: an element of randomness and a spatial component. As a consequence, my research typically applies the mathematics of stochastic spatial systems.
keywords
mathematical ecology, ecology of populations and communities, biodiversity, conservation, invasion, extinction, climate change, ecological data science
