Information for prospective students
We are always looking for outstanding, enthusiastic individuals. The lab is engaged in research on diverse taxa and uses diverse tools, and can thus offer a wide range of research experiences. We currently have openings for students studying towards MSc and PhD. Excellent Post-Doctoral candidates will also be considered.
Please contact me directly by email with inquiries.
Please contact me directly by email with inquiries.
Mentoring philosophy
Given the fast pace of science, there is an inevitable trade-off between specializing on taxa (e.g. a certain family of fish) versus specializing on research techniques and methods. My mentoring philosophy is that being ecologists, students must first familiarize themselves with their chosen group of organisms. This requires a lot of time in the field. I encourage focusing on organisms that are generally less known and less studied. However, we are also a highly quantitative lab and sooner or later students must transition and use their natural history knowledge to ask interesting ecological questions. These may be answered using some combination of experiments, observations and computer modeling. I expect students to learn ecological modeling techniques and to be well versed in statistics (being proficient requires time and hard work). Although natural history is the backbone of ecology, I discourage students purely interested in descriptive zoology from applying to the lab.