I am a community ecologist who combines tools from data science and physics to understand and model complex ecosystems of interacting organisms, and how they respond to perturbations. My research is interdisciplinary and I work in a range of habitats – from freshwater ponds, coastal marine communities, and coral reefs to urban ecosystems – and with taxa as diverse as fish, bacteria, and arthropods. My work shifts strategically between math modeling to advance theories for ecological networks; the development and application of data science tools to make sense of big ecological data; and experiments that probe expectations from theory, typically in conjunction with technologies like computer vision. I am primarily interested in uncovering the organizational principles linking ecosystems across scales: from individuals’ traits, to the behaviors of groups, dynamics of interactions, the structure of ecological networks, and the emergence of macroscopic spatial patterns.
