Hi – This is a rather generic letter to prospective graduate students. Hopefully, you will find it useful and informative. If you are interested in applying, what I write below will give much of the general information I like to convey to prospective students. It and the whole lab website will also, hopefully, give some sense of my work and the lab.
But first a fair description of our lab:
"But I don't want to go among mad people.' Alice remarked.
'Oh, you can't help that,' said the cat: 'We're all mad here, I'm mad, you're mad.'
'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
'You must be,' said the cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.' "
Lewis Carroll
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Beyond being insane, one other strict requirement to understand is that our lab has moved, so you also have to want to live in Wyoming (which is far saner than wanting to live in coastal CA). I have moved to the University of Wyoming, and in the future will be taking students both through the inter-departmental Program in Ecology and through the Dept of Zoology and Physiology. I am planning to take one or two students over the next year, but moving has taken a phenomenal amount of time and energy, and I have been grossly negligent about getting back to people who have contacted me this fall about applying to the lab.
Students in my lab work and have worked on a wide variety of topics. One common denominator is that they virtually all do their primary doctoral research on systems of their own that is not directly connected to any of my primary research areas: from raptor-rodent interactions, to honey bee-bumble bee competition, to parasitic plant ecology, to flooding effects on riparian communities, etc… plus side projects doing PVA's on various species (e.g., Mt. Graham red squirrel, Antioch Dunes evening primrose), stability-diversity modeling, the effects of grizzly bear digging on alpine plant communities, analysis of Habitat Conservation Plans, etc… These side projects are often collaborative with me. The bottom line is that while I try to interact a lot with my students about their dissertation work, I also strongly encourage each of them to have their own 'research identity' that is Not mine, as it is important for their future - it's also just more fun that way. I have not to date ever taken a masters student, but plan to do so in the future, and due to the constraints on masters projects, expect that they will frequently work more closely with me on one of my study systems.
The one true common denominator in what I look for and try to instill in students is a mathematical/modeling approach to ecological questions. While my students don't have to come in with a strong math background, I do expect that they will take enough math of various kinds to understand and do modeling in addition to field work in their research. I am no great shakes at mathematical ecology, but can help my students learn how to use quantitative approaches to better design and understand ecological studies. I should note that everyone in the lab is a field biologist; we use modeling approaches to get more out of our data, but neither I nor my students are theoreticians.
Ah, what else do people ask? My own future research directions include a combination of population modeling, for both demographic work on rare species (plants and vertebrates) and more basic ecological questions, and also other field work on plant populations. My field research is currently concentrated on arctic and alpine plant population dynamics (including life history patterns and the determinants of range limits) and the effects of termites in creating spatial structure in East African savannahs. However, I have many odd and tangential interests within and outside these fields (see the rest of the website for more on these projects).
So, that is the general scoop. Let me know what you think and what questions you have. Also on the website is a list of my publications and those of others in the lab.
