Plenary speakers

Jay Lennon is a Professor in the Department of Biology at Indiana University where he is the Chair of the Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior (EEB) Section. In Bloomington, he teaches a computationally based graduate-level course in “Quantitative Biodiversity” and an undergraduate course in “Microbiomes: host and environmental health”. In the summers, Lennon is an instructor for the Microbial Diversity course at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole. Previously, Lennon was an Assistant and Associate Professor at Michigan State University and the Kellogg Biological Station (KBS) after conducting postdoctoral research at Brown University, and receiving his Ph.D. at Dartmouth College, a Master’s degree at the University of Kansas, and a Bachelor’s degree at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF).

Lennon’s research team is motivated by the ecological and evolutionary processes that generate and maintain microbial biodiversity. In turn, they investigate the implications of diversity for the stability and functioning of ecosystems using molecular biology, mathematical modeling, data synthesis, laboratory experiments, and field work in a wide range of habitats. His group has shed light on the role of functional traits for predicting community dynamics. They have documented the importance of dormancy, whereby individuals can enter a reversible state of reduced metabolic activity. Recent work has shown how the resulting seed banks lead to the emergence of complex phenomena. His group also integrates microbial life forms with other taxa across the tree of life to test macroecological theory. Such efforts have unveiled scaling laws which predict Earth is home to 1 trillion species

Tracy Heath is an associate professor at Iowa State University in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, & Organismal Biology. Her career as a biologist began at Boston University where she earned her BA in Biology and conducted research on skink phylogeography and waterfowl systematics. She went on to pursue her PhD in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at the University of Texas at Austin. As a graduate student, Tracy shifted to focus on theoretical and computational projects that investigated the properties of phylogenetic inference methods. After earning her PhD, a joint postdoc at the University of Kansas and the University of California Berkeley provided Tracy the opportunity to make another transition in her research and she began developing new statistical models for use in phylogenetic methods, implementing these models in Bayesian inference software, and collaborating on empirical macroevolutionary studies. Tracy joined the faculty at Iowa State University in 2015 and established a research group that uses statistical modeling and Bayesian inference to understand the evolutionary processes that underly the patterns of biodiversity we see in nature and the fossil record. Tracy and her postdocs, students, and other collaborators work on a wide range of projects including: phylogenetic methods for estimating diversification dynamics from extant and fossil data, the systematics of fossil and modern penguins, modeling the co-diversifation of species interactions, understanding the macroevolutionary history of the fig/fig-wasp mutualism, and methods for simulating and estimating phylogenetic networks. Additionally, Tracy and members of her group are core developers for the program RevBayes, a software platform for phylogenetic analyses under complex evolutionary models. Outside of work, Tracy enjoys cooking, hunting, drawing, nail art, watching TV, and hanging out with her family and her dog.