I don't feel qualified to have an opinion one way or the other about E.O. Wilson's article about math. However, the discussion prompted me to ask for advice for myself. I'm coming up on a career crossroads, and in my experience, y'all on this list are generous in counseling new people.
Please let me tell you about my background before I ask for your help. I have a BS and PhD in (pure) mathematics, and got an MS in computer science along the way. My PhD thesis was on "Algebraic Methods in Game Theory". My favorite part of my thesis was neither the theorems I proved nor the computational techniques I developed. It was a new model that I came up with (in my last semester of grad school) for dealing with groups in noncooperative game theory, such that the members of the group can have a combination of shared and competing interests. After my PhD I worked at Google for two and a half years as a software engineer in computational linguistics and web analytics. Then I did my first postdoc, in phylogenomics, specifically applying evolutionary information about protein families to help infer their structure, function, pathway participation, etc. What fascinates me most is how living parts interact to form a complex system. In _The Symbiotic Habit_, A.E. Douglas writes: “the partners in symbioses are often in conflict, but the conflict is managed and controlled." Understanding this is my enduring passion. Studies of this that I've seen in some other fields have focused on interactions between two partners. However, persistent interactions among three or more are widespread in life. We need look no further than our own microbiome. In my thesis I showed that even just three is fundamentally different from two. I believe much of the focus on interacting pairs has been because the analytics are more tractable. However, in recent years many new techniques have been developed for analyzing interactions among many, by others as well as myself. One of the great attractions of ecology for me is its long history of studying systems of many interacting individuals. Four years into my first postdoc, I found my current, second postdoc by searching for "evolution of cooperation". I've now been working for a year and a half in the Center for Evolution and Cancer at the UCSF Medical Center, on cancer as an evolutionary and ecological process (the title of a 2006 paper co-authored by my current PI, Carlo Maley). The first paper that I co-authored with this group just came out in January, on "Modeling the evolution of genetic instability during tumour progression." Here we developed and interrogated a stochastic simulation of a well-mixed population of mutating tumor cells, in which the mutation rate itself could also evolve. I'm currently working on a spatial model, as well as other collaborative projects focusing on clonal heterogeneity and evolution in cancer. For my own personal research program, I would like to model the human body as an ecosystem of populations of individual cells (e.g., lymphocytes, pre-cancerous or cancerous cells, stromal cells, gut flora, pathogens, etc.) interacting in various niches (e.g., bone marrow, the microenvironment of an epithelial tumor, crypts in the gut, etc.) and being influenced at short- and long-range scales (e.g. by paracrine and endocrine signaling, alternate energetic pathways, etc.) in contexts where these different populations have shared and competing interests. I'm very grateful for your attention and consideration up to this point. Now my two questions: 1) I sat in on a graduate course in microbial ecology a few years ago, and I've absorbed a bit about ecology from conferences on the human microbiome. Otherwise, I've been teaching myself. I'm currently studying a few books: _The Princeton Guide to Ecology_ edited by Simon Levin http://amzn.to/ZNFfns _The Theoretical Biologist's Toolbox: Quantitative Methods for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology_ by Marc Mangel http://amzn.to/Ym7O0h _Individual-Based Modeling and Ecology_ by Volker Grimm and Steven F. Railsback http://amzn.to/ZHbDzc I'm finding ecology really congenial and fascinating--I'm loving it. However, although I read relatively fast, I'm no longer a graduate student with years to devote to studying a field. Given my specific interests, what books, book chapters, or papers would you recommend for me to most effectively learn what I need to pursue my research program? (This might include specific sections of the above books, if you think that's useful.) 2) This fall I'll be seeking a faculty position. The research program I'd like to pursue, although specific, could be considered to be part of a few different departments. Do y'all think any departments of ecology & evolutionary biology would be a good fit for me and my research program? If so, which ones, and what would y'all suggest I do to strengthen my candidacy? Thank you all so much for your help. I sincerely appreciate it! --Ruchira Datta
