Katrina and Richard joined the lab in Fall 2020. We would have loved to welcome them under much better circumstances, but we're very excited to having them with us! Richard is co-advised with Justin Wright. Welcome Katrina and Richard!  ..read more

We are very excited to welcome Dan Wieczynski who is joining us from UCLA to work on our DOE grant. Welcome Dan ..read more

The US Department of Energy is funding our $3.1M grant to study the neglected controls on peatland C cycling: bacterial predation by protists and viral infections. This grant is central to our ability to predict whether warming will beget further warming, through positive feedbacks on bacterial communities that release CO2, as their abundances may be controlled by temperature-dependent interactions with predatory protists and disease. Our understanding of how these moss-associated food webs, and food webs in general, may respond to changes in temperature, is nascent. This grant will thus fill ..read more

Zeyi Han has joined the lab as a new PhD student. Z will be working on eco-evolutionary dynamics on food webs from a theoretical and empirical perspective. Welcome Z ..read more

I learned yesterday that I am one of the 2019 recipients of the American Society of Naturalists Jasper Loftus-Hills Young Investigator Award. I'm both honored and humbled by this award. I will be presenting a research paper in the young investigator symposium at this year's joint ASN, Society for the Study of Evolution, and the Society of Systematic Biologists meeting: Evolution 2019, in Providence, RI. I can't wait to meet my other three fellow awardees, thank you ASN! This wouldn't have been possible without the help, support and dedication of my advisors and mentors: Paulo Guimar ..read more

Two new papers are coming out now! Both papers are part of my work with Justin Yeakel at UC Merced as a James McDonnell Postdoctoral Fellow in Complex Systems. The first one is in press in Theoretical Ecology and deals with the importance of movement of organisms across landscapes to understand ecological dynamics (a bit of a retrospective work, building upon Levin 74). The second one, explores how eco-evolutionary dynamics may determine important structural aspects of food webs (evolving trophic levels!), and was published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution as an invited contribution to th ..read more

Last week I accepted a faculty position in the Department of Biology at Duke University. So, starting September 2018, the Gibert lab will be shaping up!  If you're looking for an opportunity to address fundamental and applied questions about predator-prey interactions and food webs, from individuals to ecosystems, using a mixture of theoretical and empirical tools, this might just be your place! Starting now, I will be recruiting motivated and independent grad students that are excited about stepping out of their comfort zone (to boldly go...). I am committed to building a diverse and su ..read more

My paper on how intraspecific phenotypic variation may determine some structural aspects of food webs (predator connectivity patterns, interaction strengths and trophic level) just got accepted in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences! While this paper has long been in the making, it is the first direct product of my McDonnell Postdoctoral Fellowship, which makes it even more satisfying. I'll have a pdf of the paper in the publications section soon ..read more

Just got a paper accepted in Ecology Letters with John DeLong and my amazing undergrads Rachel Allen and Ron Hruska! It's about how a species of protist, Paramecium bursaria, changes shape, but not size, with changes in environmental conditions and resource availability. As it turns out, those changes have all sorts of ecological effects, from population dynamics, to susceptibility to predation by a predatory copepod. A pdf of the paper will be posted soon in the publications section ..read more

I just got a paper accepted in GCB in collaboration with Marie-Claire Chelini, Malcolm Rosenthal and John DeLong, on the temperature dependence of animal movement and its ecological consequences. We found that animal movement displays regimes of temperature dependence, and crossing these regimes has important implications for their persistence in a context of global warming. Check it out in my publications tab!  ..read more