Decades of research has focused on characterizing the equilibria ecological systems will approach long-term, often using conceptual frameworks and models built on the linearization of ecological dynamics about these equilibria. This has yielded powerful tools driving ecology forward as a predictive science and fundamental insights into how numerous real world ecological systems operate. Yet, the dynamics of many ecological systems remain poorly understood, and are often complicated by the heterogeneity of landscapes, ongoing natural and anthropogenic changes occurring over differing spatial and temporal scales, environmental and demographic stochasticity, and transient and non-linear  population dynamics of the species within them. These "messy elements" of ecological systems present considerable challenges in building the predictive frameworks necessary to understand the consequences of our rapidly changing world on biodiversity, and open up many fundamental yet unanswered questions in ecology. How and when might some of these messy elements come to interact with each other and cause species and their communities to respond in counterintuitive ways? When and for which species might commonly used predictive frameworks fail us? How do the spatiotemporal scales on which species are impacted by global changes relate to the spatial and temporal scales of species' responses?

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I focus on approaching broad ecological questions like these using theory grounded in how we empirically measure specific aspects of ecological systems and the organisms within them, to build better predictive frameworks for when and how these messy elements are important to ecological systems. To do so, I use a combination of mathematical models and simulation-based approaches.

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As such, my research is largely non-specific to any particular ecological system. However, I always draw inspiration from real world ecological systems, my favourite of which are marine. During my PhD, this brought me into collaboration with researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute with whom I have worked on developing models capturing ecological dynamics at play for species subsisting on deep sea hydrothermal vents. And I am now excited to be beginning as a postdoc under Alexa Fredston in the Ocean Sciences department at UCSC, in which we aim to use theory I am developing to better understand marine species range shifts in response to climate change.