"I remember the day when, at the age of 7, I realized that I wanted to figure out how reality worked," writes SFI External ...

Understanding how populations respond to selective pressures is an active area of research, of particular relevance for pathogens, which often adapt after the implementation of epidemic control ...

All interactions between individuals of the same or different species (populations) are metabolically-constrained. That is, the rate of an individual's energy use (metabolic rate) sets the rate of ...

Bacterial cooperation, whereby cells secrete compounds that can facilitate the growth of neighboring cells, has been extensively studied through the lens of evolutionary biology. However, the ...

Community ecology is built on the notion of interspecies interactions. The strengths of interactions are almost invariably taken as fixed parameters, which must either be measured or assumed. The few ...

Cyclic outbreaks of forest insects devastate forests, leading to widespread defoliation and tree death. Outbreaks would be far worse if not for epidemics of fatal virus diseases, which decimate ...

Here I describe recent theoretical work by my lab looking at the emergent patterning in models where niche differentiation acts in concert with drift and immigration, as well as empirical work looking ...

I will discuss several examples from population genetics and adaptive dynamics where the probability for a transition between “equilibrium” states is very low. These situations can occur when ...

The difficulty of reconciling the staggering biodiversity found in tropical rainforests with classical theories of resource partitioning has led ecologists to explore neutral theories of coexistence, ...

In a seminal paper in 1972, Robert May studied complex ecosystems using Random Matrix Theory. Nearly fifty years later, the rise of quantitative microbial ecology makes it possible to test and refine ...

Phenotypic traits constitute the interface between the organism and the environment. Adaptive evolution occurs when trait responses to the environment maximize fitness subject to constraints. These ...