JPBO Alum Wins Ecological Society Award

Joint Program alumna Prof. Mercedes Pascual has been awarded the Robert H. MacArthur Award by the Ecological Society of America (ESA).  One of the society's most prestigious awards, the MacArthur Award "is given biannually to an established ecologist in mid-career for meritorious contributions to ecology, in the expectation of continued outstanding ecological research. The recipient is invited to prepare an address for presentation at the annual meeting of the society and for publication in Ecology." 

Prof. Pascual is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and the Rosemary Grant Collegiate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan. As a Joint Program Student she was supervised by Hal Caswell. Her dissertation research focussed on "the interplay of scales in nonlinear ecological systems, with an emphasis on the mismatch of scales between biological variables and environmental forcings in the plankton."  Since then, Prof. Pascual has worked on a diversity of topics including the relationship between food web structure and dynamics and the effects of climate variability and climate change on the dynamics of infectious diseases such as cholera and malaria."  The ESA recognized her for devoting "enormous energy to fostering diversity of ecological researchers in the US and mentoring junior researchers worldwide," in addition to her research accomplishments.

A brief biography of Robert MacArthur, written by his colleague Edward O. Wilson and his Ph.D. supervisor, G. Evelyn Hutchinson, is worth reading.