I am a post-doctoral fellow in the EvoDemo lab of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. What allows organisms to live under harsh conditions? Why do most extremely long-lived species occur in aridlands? Under what conditions can modular organisms escape senescence? These are some of the questions that motivate my research, and to address them I use a wide range of tools, from histology, field-based ecophysiological measurements, long-term demographic censuses, population matrix modelling and comparative analyses. My long-term plans include becoming a faculty member and bringing together physiology, demography and ecological modeling to help us understand the ecology of arid environments and project their performance before climate change.  |
What's new?
June 2012: IPM working group meeting held at MPIDR
June 2012: Evolutionary Biodemography workshop held at MPIDR
May 2012: to Utah to work with Peter Adler and carry out the 15th annual demographic census in the desert plant Cryptantha flava in the Colorado Plateau desert
Apr 2012: to Spain to carry out the second annual demographic census in the endemic, fire-dependent, carnivorous plant Drosophyllum lusitanicum
Apr 2012: to The Netherlands to work with Eelke Jongejans, Hans de Kroon, Pieter Zuidema and Miguel Franco in a project on comparative demography
Mar 2012: Vacation in Vienna!
Mar 2012: Visit by David Hodgson to collaborate on comparative demography in plants and animals
Mar 2012: To Amsterdam to act as research advisor in a global biodiversity-informatics project hosted by Gerard Oostermeijer.
Feb 2012: Visit by Aldo Compagnoni, from Peter Adler's lab, to work on comparative functional trait-demography, and IPMs on annual plants
Feb 2012: Visit by Sean McMahon, Jessica Metcalf and Eelke Jongejans to work on IPM6pack, an R package for integral projection models
Feb 2012: Submitted paper on effects of climate change in desert plants in collaboration with Katja Tielboerger and others - fingers crossed!
Jan 2012: Proposal for workshop on Integral Projection Models accepted for the ESA 2012 meeting.
Jan 2012: Proposal for Special Feature in Journal of Ecology on "Senescence in modular organisms" accepted.
Jan 2012: Proposal for organized oral session on "Senescence across the tree of life: new theories and methodological advances" accepted for the ESA 2012 meeting.
Dec 2011: Visiting URJC to work with Fernando Maestre, Txema Iriondo, and Pedro Quintana-Ascencio.
Dec 2011: Successfully granted proposal for working group on "Integral Projection Models in a Stochastic and Continuous World" in collaboration with Sean McMahon, Jessica Metcalf and Eelke Jongejans to take place during 2012 at MPIDR and IMPRSD.
Nov 2011: Starting demographic fieldwork in So. Spain with an endemic, carnivorous plant species (Drosophyllum lusitanicum)
Oct 2011: Visit by Pedro Quintana-Ascencio from UCF.
Oct 2011: Vacation in Spain.
Sept 2011: Co-organizing the symposium "Impacts of global environmental change on the structure and functioning of dryland ecosystems" with Fernando Maestre at the 12th European Ecological Federation meeting in Avila (Spain).Also giving a talk entitled "Divide to survive: desert plant module shedding increases whole plant fitness".
Sept 2011: Presenting at EvoDemo lab meeting "Split and thou shall survive"
Sept 2011: Proposal for symposium at ESA 2012 on "Universal senescence? New theories and experimental approaches across the tree of life", in collaboration with Rich Sheffeson, under review for sponsorship. This includes confirmed talks by Baudisch, Vaupel, Doak, Caswell, Tuljapurkar, Pringle...
Aug 2011: Proposal for special feature on "Impacts of global environmental change on drylands: from ecosystem structure and functioning to poverty alleviation" accepted for Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, in collaboration with Fernando Maestre.
Aug 2011: Vacation in Big Bend N.P.
Aug 2011: Attending Ecological Society of America conference, in Austin, TX, where I'm giving a talk on the importance of individual size in desert population dynamics, and organizing a workshop on peer-reviewing for young ecologists.
Jul 2011: INNGE (International Network of Next Generation Ecologists) site is up and running. This is a new enterprise in collaboration with other young ecologists the world under the umbrella of INTECOL.
Jul 2011: Proposal to study the population dynamics of the endemic, carnivorous species Drosophyllum lusitanicum in Morocco and Spain granted by the Spanish Ministerium of Science. Project led by Fernando Ojeda (UCA) where I'm a co-PI.
Jul 2011: Vacation in Berlin and Hamburg.
Jul 2011: Proposal to explore effect of functional traits on plant population dynamics in collaboration with the Adler lab submitted to TRY.
Jul 2011: Meeting Rich Shefferson in Frankfurt.
Jul 2011: Attending workshop on Scientific Writing at the MPIDR.
Jul 2011: Attending workshop in Evolutionary Demography at the MPIDR.
Jun 2011: Attending workshop in Perturbation Analysis of Lifespan at the MPIDR
Jun 2011: A short vacation in Spain!
Jun 2011: Plant Population conference in Oxford, UK.
May 2011: I have received the Long-Term Studies Section award of the Ecological Society of America.
May 2011: Fieldwork in the Great Basin desert and collaboration with Peter Adler in Utah.
May 2011: Paper on effects of deer on red oak demography submitted to PNAS (fingers crossed!)... and rejected :( now in J Ecol.
May 2011: Paper on the involvement of young researchers in peer-reviewing came out in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
Mar 30th 2011: Moving to my new position in Rostock (Germany), as a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.
Mar 2001: Root paper came out online in New Phytologist.
Mar 2011: Roadtrip to New Orleans!
Mar 2011: Attending the Stochastic Modeling in Biology tutorial at NIMBioS
See link to talk here
Feb 1st 2011: Fell from my bike, broke my left radius :( fantastic motivation for defense prepping...
Jan 2010: Root ecology paper accepted in New Phytologist
Jan 2010: Proposal for a workshop on reviewing scientific articles entitled "Things they don't typically teach you in grad school: peer-reviewing inside-out" accepted for the 96th annual ESA meeting in Austin, TX.
Dec 2010: Root ecology paper submitted and in review in New Phytologist (fingers crossed!)
Nov 2010: Invited to give a lecture at UPenn on population viability analyses (PVAs), extinction and conservation
Nov 2010: Arrival of Zhang Haihan (PhD student at Northwest A&F Univ, China), to collaborate on a project to explore the role of vegetation facilitation on
mycorrhizal communities in the Great Basin desert.
Oct 2010: Am Nat paper on the effects of matrix dimension for plant comparative analyses is online.
Oct 2010: Invited seminar at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Spain) hosted by Fernando Maestre
Oct 2010: Invited seminar at University of Central Florida hosted by Pedro Quintana-Ascencio
Sept 2010: Hydraulic sectoriality work available on early online view in New Phytologist
Aug 2010: Attended 95th annual conference of the ESA and presented results of climate change experiment on five years of demographic studies in the Great
Basin desert. Now writing the manuscript...
July 2010: Effects of matrix dimension on comparative plant demography work accepted in The American Naturalist
July 2010: Hydraulic sectoriality work accepted in New Phytologist
June 2010: After I get my PhD at UPenn, I will be doing a two-year research postdoc at the Max Plank Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany
June 2010: I accepted a position as Associate Editor of Journal of Ecology
June 2010: I just completed the very last demographic census of my doctoral research in the Great Basin Desert, in Utah
May 2010: Angela Zeng's work "Intra-specific variation in plant hydraulic sectoriality along an aridity gradient" will be presented in the late-breaking poster session
of the 2010 ESA in Pittsburgh.
May 2010: I have been awarded the School of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Completion Fellowship (from now on it's just a matter of writing!)
April 2010: visiting Prof James Vaupel @ Max Plank Institute for Demographic Research
March 2010: visiting Prof Pieter Zuidema @ Utrecht University and Prof Hans de Kroon at Nijmegen University
Feb 2010: Special Feature in Journal of Ecology came out:
