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After three and a half great years as a postdoctoral associate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, working under the advice of Mercedes Pascual (Feb 04- Gen 07), and Annette Ostling (Feb 07- Aug 07), in April 2007 I was awarded with a VENI grant by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). So I moved from Michigan back to Europe. Currently I work at the Conservation and Community Ecology Group directed by Han Olff in the Center for Ecological and Evolutionary Studies, University of Groningen. I received my PhD from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, (2004) under the supervision of Ricard V. Sole at the Complex Systems Lab, nowadays located at the University Pompeu Fabra. My primary research interests lie in the interdisciplinary study of ecology and evolution on the basis of the integration of physics, mathematics, biology and computer simulation. Nonlinear interactions, stochasticity, environmental forcing, and rapid evolution are all common features of the problems on which my research agenda is focused. For the last couple of years, I have conducted research driven by two general interests: the evaluation of risks of spread and emergence of infectious diseases as a consequence of human-induced global environmental change and the study of the variety of mechanisms involved in the origins, maintenance and loss of species in ecological communities. Underlying all these challenging problems in community ecology and infectious diseases, there is a common goal: to explore the interplay between individual-based local interactions ---the processes at the microscale--- and the system-level regularities and collective behavior which are observed at larger scales ---the macroecological and evolutionary patterns. In essence, I am very interested in exploring to what extent natural systems in their tremendeous complexity due to an extremely high number of degrees of freedom can be described by and understood in terms of simple ---perhaps universal--- low dimensional abstractions and useful approximations.
Conservation
and Community Ecology,
University of Groningen
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