Through a mixture of circumstances, I suddenly have 2-3 grad student positions open in my lab for fall 2014 or winter 2015. So while I know this is very much not the season for this sort of thing, if you’re looking to do an M.Sc. or Ph.D. asking fundamental questions in population, community, or evolutionary ecology, please drop me a line ([email protected]).
For background on my lab, visit my lab website (http://homepages.ucalgary.ca/~jefox/Home.htm). Briefly, my own work mostly involves modeling and experiments on population and community dynamics using laboratory-based microbial model systems. But most of my students have worked in other systems, including alpine plants, plant-pollinator interactions, and bean beetles. Basically, I’m happy for my students to work in any system as long as I and my Calgary colleagues have the financial and intellectual resources needed to support the work. Some examples of the questions I and my students have been working on recently: -Quantifying local adaptation of lake bacteria to spatial and temporal variation in water chemistry -Eco-evolutionary dynamics of competing bean beetles -Interplay of drift and determinism in community dynamics -Spatial synchrony of population dynamics -Other projects include facilitation, coexistence, and plant species distributions along elevation gradients, and various other developing ideas. And I’m very open to students (especially Ph.D. students) who have their own ideas. The Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary (http://www.bio.ucalgary.ca/) has a strong group of about a dozen ecologists and evolutionary biologists, with strength in depth in evolutionary ecology, population ecology, plant-insect interactions, fish ecology, and other areas. The department has two field stations in the mountains, next-generation sequencing facilities, access to various high-performance computing clusters, and everything else you’d expect from a big, well-equipped research university. Grad students in the department are guaranteed a minimum of $21,000/year through a mixture of TAships, RAships, and other sources like fellowships. Calgary is a city of over 1 million people, 45 minutes drive from the Canadian Rockies with all the opportunities for field work and recreation that implies. If you’re interested, please email me ASAP. Tell me a bit about your background, interests, and long-term goals, and about what specifically attracts you to my lab and/or Calgary more broadly. Please also include a cv, undergraduate and any graduate transcripts (unofficial is fine), and contact details for three references.
