I am seeking two graduate students (MSc or PhD) to start in Sept. 2022 or Jan. 2023.
For background on my lab, visit my lab website. Briefly, my own work mostly involves modeling and experiments on population and community dynamics using laboratory-based microbial model systems. But some of my students have worked in other systems, including alpine plants, plant-pollinator interactions, bean beetles, fossil bivalves, and meta-analysis of data from the literature. So whether you want to join one of the ongoing lines of research in my lab, or have your own ideas, please do get in touch.
See my research page for more on ongoing research in my lab. Current lines of research include:
- Spatial synchrony of population cycles. Why do population cycles and spatial synchrony often (but not always!) seem to go hand-in-hand?
- Higher order interactions and species coexistence. Are communities more than just the sum of their parts, and if so, what implications does that have for species coexistence?
- Studying ecologists, not just ecology. Using a huge database of effect sizes from 466 ecological meta-analyses to quantify what ecologists know about ecology (all of ecology!), and how fast they’re learning it.
The Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary has a strong group of over a dozen ecologists and evolutionary biologists, with strength in depth in evolutionary ecology, population ecology, aquatic 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 $23,000/year through a mixture of TAships, RAships, and other sources like fellowships. In practice, students in my lab make more than the departmentally-guaranteed minimum.
Calgary is a city of about 1.3 million people, 45 minutes drive from the Canadian Rockies with all the opportunities for field work and recreation that implies. I mean, look at these mountains!
If you’re interested, please email me ASAP (jefox@ucalgary.ca). Doesn’t have to be a super-long email. Just 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, transcripts (unofficial is fine), and contact details for three references.
Dynamic Ecology 