Professor Stephen Buckland, University of St Andrews, UK
Stephen Buckland has been Professor of Statistics at the University of St Andrews since 1993. He is Director of the Centre for Research into Ecological and Environmental Modelling (CREEM) at St Andrews. He founded CREEM in 1999, and it is now a group of over 30 staff and research students, most of whom are statistical ecologists. He is also Director of the UK’s National Centre for Statistical Ecology (NCSE), which he co-founded in 2005. NCSE now encompasses around 80 statistical ecologists from 17 UK institutions. He was a Leverhulme Research Fellow in 2005-06, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2007. His research interests include state-space models for population and community dynamics, wildlife resource management, distance sampling and biodiversity monitoring. He has published around 175 scientific articles and five books.
Professor Anne Chao, Institute of Statistics, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan
Anne Chao is Tsing Hua Distinguished Chair Professor, Institute of Statistics, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. She received a PhD in 1977 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Statistics. Since 1978, she has been working in National Tsing Hua University. Her main research areas include statistical estimation of bio-diversity indices and statistical analysis of ecological and environmental survey data. Specific methodological interests include species abundance estimation and its applications, capture-recapture experiments and population size estimation, as well as related statistical inferences and quantitative methods in ecology. Recent interests focus on developing a unified mathematical/statistical framework and appropriate software for genetic, taxonomic and functional diversities. She serves currently as an Associate Editor for Biometrics and Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Statistics. She is a Fellow of Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
Professor Robin Chazdon, University of Conneticut, USA
Robin Chazdon is a professor in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at the University of Connecticut. Her research interests include biodiversity conservation and regeneration of tropical forests, tropical forest successional dynamics, and biodiversity in human-modified tropical landscapes. Recent research focuses on temporal and spatial variation in species composition, functional diversity, and phylogenetic diversity of woody species in tropical forests. She conducts collaborative research on secondary forest regeneration in Costa Rica, Mexico, and Brazil and is the lead organizer of the neoSelvas Network on Tropical Forest Regeneration and Restoration. Chazdon served as Editor-in-Chief of Biotropica, President of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation, and as a member-at-large of the governing board of the Ecological Society of America. She served on the Scientific Advisory Board of the National Center for Ecological Research and Synthesis among other research advisory committees and editorial boards. She serves on the Founder’s Board of the Costa Rica-USA Foundation, a bi-national NGO that supports sustainable development activities in Costa Rica. She is an author of over 100 peer-reviewed scientific articles, co-editor of two books, and recipient of the President’s Medal of the British Ecological Society in 2003.
Professor Robert Colwell, University of Conneticut, USA
Robert Colwell is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut (USA). He studied at Harvard and the University of Michigan, and has worked at the University of California at Berkeley, the Universidad de Chile, James Cook University (Australia), UNAM (México), and was recently Visiting Professor at the Danish NSF Center for Macroecology and Evolution at University of Copenhagen. As an evolutionary ecologist, his interests center on the biology and geography of biodiversity. In the tropics, he has worked with the ecology and evolution of species interactions, and managed and developed database tools for a major biodiversity inventory. His work with biogeographical theory and stochastic spatial models has stimulated controversy, new directions in the field, and links with systematics and conservation biology. In collaboration with colleagues in statistics, he has been active in developing new statistical methods and software tools for biodiversity statistics.
Professor Tom Curtis, Newcastle University, UK
Tom graduated in Microbiology and migrated to Environmental Engineering taking an MEng and PhD in Public Health Engineering at Leeds University. Both degrees entailed substantial fieldwork in Paraiba in north east Brazil. After a brief period in construction in the Middle East and two years in Public Health Policy with the UK government he joined Newcastle University (in 1994) as a lecturer in Environmental Engineering. His core interest is the engineering of real open microbial systems and his abiding belief is that these systems obey a suite of fundamental rules and that engineers will only unlock the power of such systems when they grasp those rules. Working with colleagues in Glasgow and Newcastle he has developed tools, concepts and theories that support this end. He has become particularly well known for his work on the engineering of the diversity and community assembly of microbial communities. This work is central to all open biological systems, engineered or otherwise and could be an essential pre-requisite for the application of synthetic biological methods in such systems.
Dr Maria Dornelas, Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal
Maria Dornelas recently joined the Centre for Environmental and Marine Studies at the Universidade de Aveiro, to study biodiversity patterns of deep-sea communities. She was a research fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University in Australia (2008-2009) studying coral community dynamics. She was post-doctoral fellow at the University of St Andrews (2007) examining effects of environmental constraints on biodiversity patterns. She completed her PhD at James Cook University in 2006, during which she focused on neutral theory and coral communities. Maria is interested understanding how ecological processes affect biodiversity patterns, and she likes combining fieldwork and mathematical models to address questions under this theme.
Professor Kevin Gaston, University of Sheffield, UK
Kevin J Gaston is Professor of Biodiversity & Conservation in the Department of Animal & Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield. He has 20 years of research experience in biodiversity science, conducting studies both in the UK and overseas on a wide range of topics, with particular emphasis on the ecologies of rare organisms, the structure of geographical ranges and patterns in species richness. He holds a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award (2006-), is an honorary Professor at the University of Stellenbosch (2002-), won the Ecology Institute International Recognition of Professional Excellence Prize (1999), is an ISI Highly Cited Researcher (2003-), and is entered in Who’s Who (2005-). He has published >350 science papers in peer-reviewed journals, and 13 books.
Professor Nicholas Gotelli, University of Vermont, USA
Nick Gotelli is a Professor in the Department of Biology, University of Vermont, where he teaches ecology and evolution. His current research interests include: ant diversity and biogeography; the evolutionary ecology of carnivorous pitcher plants; community responses to global climate change; macroecology; and the statistical analysis of biodiversity and community structure. He is the author of three books: A Primer of Ecology, Null Models in Ecology (with Gary Graves), and A Primer of Ecological Statistics (with Aaron Ellison), and two software packages: BioGeoSim (with Gary Entsminger, Carsten Rahbek, Rob Colwell, and Gary Graves) and EcoSim (with Gary Entsminger).
Dr Matthew Kosnik, Macquarie University, Australia
Matthew Kosnik is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia) where he uses shell accumulations in the sedimentary record to establish baselines for measuring anthropogenic change in marine ecosystems. His pursuit of pre-human baselines began in 2003 when he took up a three year post-doctoral fellowship at James Cook University (Townsville, Australia) where his fieldwork focused on sampling living and Holocene molluscs from the sedimentary lagoons of the Great Barrier Reef. He continued work on those samples as a post-doctoral research associate in the Smithsonian's Department of Paleobiology (Washington DC) where he worked on the taphonomy and time-averaging of his Australian collections. Matthew has a BA from Austin College and a PhD from the University of Chicago. His research interests focus on changing molluscan communities on scales ranging from the macro-evolutionary to anthropogenic.
Professor Anne Magurran, University of St Andrews, UK
Anne Magurran is professor of ecology and evolution at the University of St Andrews. She did her PhD on biological diversity at the University of Ulster, was a postdoc at the universities of Bangor and Oxford and is particularly grateful to the Royal Society for its support in the form of a University Research Fellowship. Anne has written two books on the measurement of biodiversity (Ecological Diversity and its Measurement, Princeton 1988 and Measuring Biological Diversity, Blackwell 2004) and co-edited a further two (Evolution of Biological Diversity, with R.M. May, OUP 1999, and Biological Diversity: Frontiers in Measurement and Assessment, with B.J. McGill, OUP and due for publication later this year).
Professor Brian McGill, University of Maine, USA
Brian McGill has a BA in Mathematics from Harvard and a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Arizona. In between the two degrees he spent almost 10 years in the software consulting business. He is an assistant professor in the School of Biology and Ecology and the Sustainability Solutions Initiative at the University of Maine. He has previously been on the faculty at the University of Arizona and McGill University. His research broadly focuses on large-scale ecology - studying questions involving large spatial and long temporal scales and/or many species. He is especially interested in the interactions between community structure and the abioitic environment. Current focal questions include studying predicting the effects of climate change on organisms and measuring the effects of land use change on communities.
Dr Helene Morlon, University of Oregon, USA
After studying mathematics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in France, Helene completed a PhD in Environmental Sciences from the University of Bordeaux. She then worked as a post-doctoral researcher at UC Merced, the University of Oregon, the University of Pennsylvania, and UC Berkeley. Helene is currently finishing a post-doc at UC Berkeley before heading back to Paris, where she will start a research position with the CNRS. Helene will be based in the Center for Applied Mathematics at the Ecole Polytechnique. She is broadly interested in biodiversity research - combining mathematics, bioinformatics and fieldwork to study questions ranging from macroevolution to community assembly, biogeography, and conservation.
Professor Peter Mumby, University of Queensland, Australia
Peter Mumby obtained his PhD in coral reef remote sensing from the University of Sheffield and then moved to the University of Newcastle as a NERC Post-doctoral Fellow. In 2000, Peter was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship and moved to the University of Exeter where his work combined empirical and theoretical studies of coral reef resilience. Peter is now an ARC Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland (Australia) and was awarded a Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation in 2010.
Dr Lise Øvreås, University of Bergen, Norway
Lise Øvreås has been an active member in a research group that has pioneered whole community analysis in soil, water and sediment ecosystems. She has a solid research experience in environmental microbiology, and in developing and applying holistic molecular techniques for use in natural ecosystems. She has further experience in using high throughput sequencing analyses to gain knowledge about the biodiversity and ecology of microorganisms from various environments. Her research interests are genetic diversity and population dynamics of microorganisms in their natural environments, population ecology and community ecology; natural variation in the in the microbial community composition and also the regulation of biodiversity and adaptability of a microbial community to external stress factors. Current work is focused on studies of microbial diversity in Arctic tundra, diversity of haloalkaline lakes in the Ethiopian rift valley and the microbial diversity in the deep biosphere of the ocean crust.
Ms Angelika Studeny, Centre for Research into Ecological and Eonvironmental Modelling, University of St Andrews, UK
Angelika Studeny is a final year PhD student in statistics within the Centre for Research into Ecological and Environmental Modelling (CREEM), in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of St Andrews. She holds a "Diplom" (MSc) in mathematics from the Ludwig-Maximillians-University, Munich. Her MSc thesis “Asymptotics of Genetic Hitchhiking”, which was rooted in mathematical population genetics, introduced her to interdisciplinary research at the intersection of mathematics and biology. This sparked a strong interest in applications of probability theory and statistics to other fields, in particular to ecological problems.
Angelika's PhD research concerns methods for the quantification of biodiversity, focusing on the detection of regional and temporal trends in biodiversity. Furthermore, she develops ways of reducing bias in diversity assessment that stems from variation in detectability among species and other sources of heterogeneity. This includes issues of survey design.
Dr Mark Vellend, University of British Columbia, Canada
Mark Vellend is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Conservation Biology at the University of British Columbia, where he conducts research on the ecology, genetics and conservation of plant populations and communities, often in an historical context. He received BSc and MSc degrees from McGill University, a PhD from Cornell University, and he was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (Santa Barbara, California). His broader interests include parallels between theories in ecology and evolution, and quantification of biodiversity at multiple levels.