We have a new quantitative ecologist joining our ranks, Mollie Brooks, who is a recent PhD graduate from University of Florida, Gainesville. Fresh out of Ben Bolker’s group, Mollie is bringing with her much needed skills in statistical and demographic analysis, and to our pleasant surprise, in baking!
During her postdoc, Mollie will contribute to our research projects on early warning signals and resurrecting past eco-evolutionary responses.
A warm welcome to Jérôme Guélat, who is starting his PhD degree in February. Jérôme’s PhD is an exciting collaboration with Dr. Marc Kéry from the Swiss Ornithological Institute, where Jérôme has been working as a GIS specialist. For his PhD, he will investigate the spatiotemporal dynamics of breeding bird populations across Switzerland using a hierarchical model and disparate data collected over large spatial and temporal scales. We are looking forward to having him on board as our spatial analysis expert and embassador of the Vogelwarte.
Together with Dr. Aurelie Cohas and Prof. Dom Allain (University of Lyon), who have been working on an Alpine marmot population in French Alps for over 20 years, we have been thinking on a research plan to investigate the physiological, behavioural and demographic responses of the rotund rodents to environmental change. All we needed was an eco-physiologist, who would help us to better understand the hibernation physiology, and Dr. Cindy Canale stepped on to the scene. Cindy wrote an excellent fellowship proposal, all the while chasing lemurs in Madagaskar, and we just learned that she won the prestigious Marie Curie Postdoctoral Award. She is joining our ranks in February. A big welcome to our group and congratulations for the well-deserved award!
Many long-term studies on larger vertebrates provide us with only a single time series to study population dynamics. To test all the interesting hypotheses arising from these studies, we have to shrink those systems into tubes and replicate under different treatments. For this, with the invaluable help of Dr. Diego Fontaneto (Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Italy), we chose the rotifers as our experimental system. It didn’t take too long for us to realize that we needed expert help. And that help arrived as a swiss-army-knife of a guy: Stefan Sommers, our research associate, rotifer-meister, orchestrator of our microcosm lab!
Gabriele Cozzi, an almost-done PhD student in the Schmid Group, came to my office one day with bunch of stinky gps collars and asked me if we could make any use of these.
Couple weeks later, he was hugging not-so-teddy bears in Northeastern Turkey. One thing led to another, and Gabriele is now (his successful defence in Feb permitting) a postdoc in our group specialising on animal movement ecology. His research plans are shaping up and will involve carnivores as dangerous as meerkats and as cuddly as bears.
We have the first member of our group: Ms. Lilian Dutoit.
A research group (especially in the Swiss system) cannot function without someone to tell us what’s what! Lillian is going to be our boss, administrative angel, and chief holder of all the scolding rights (also our “spy” in Schmid Group, which kindly shared Lilian’s admin help!).