(members of the board of trustees)
Dr. Axel G. Rossberg (Chair of the Board of Trustees) is Reader in Theoretical Ecology at Queen Mary University of London. He is a world leading food-web theorist, author of the monograph Food Webs and Biodiversity, honoured by the 2013 PROSE award in Biological Sciences, and member of the editorial boards of Theoretical Ecology and The American Naturalist. Dr. Rossberg holds a PhD in complex-systems physics (U Bayreuth, 1998); his approach to theoretical ecology is strongly influenced by this background.
Dr Chris Terry (Treasurer) is a postdoctoral researcher at Queen Mary University of London, after a DPhil and postdoctoral research in the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. He is a community ecologist whose research focuses on how the interactions between species will determine how whole communities respond to global change as well as developing methods to extract the maximum amount of information from sparse ecological data.
Dr Natalia Petrovskaya is an applied mathematician and a Senior Lecturer in the School of Mathematics in the University of Birmingham, UK. She has an MSci degree in theoretical physics and applied mathematics and her PhD degree is in applied numerical analysis. Her current research interests concern mathematical modelling and computer simulation of spatial ecological systems. In particular, she is interested in development of non-conventional numerical algorithms for ecological problems where standard numerical methods do not work or are not efficient because of the problem complexity.
Professor Géza Meszéna is a theoretical physicist by education, working on theoretical ecology and evolution. He is interested in adaptive emergence and maintenance of biological diversity, i.e. speciation and niche theory. Géza believes in the need for, and possibility of, a first-principles unifying theory of population biology. He was among the developers of Adaptive Dynamics theory and co-authored the book Theory-Based Ecology: A Darwinian approach.
Professor Mercedes Pascual (just jointed, more to come)
Professor Cang Hui is a mathematical and theoretical ecologist at Stellenbosch University. He holds a South African Research Chair in Mathematical and Theoretical Physical Biosciences, and also serves as co-affiliated researcher at African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Muizenberg and core-team member of DST-NRF Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology. His research focuses on developing models and theories, married with rich datasets, for explaining emerging patterns of biodiversity, networks, and traits in conservation and global change biology, especially invasion ecology. He has published more than 200 research articles and authored two books, Invasion Dynamics and Ecological and Evolutionary Modelling.
Professor Sergei Petrovskii is an applied mathematician with thirty years of research experience in theoretical ecology and ecological modelling. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Ecological Complexity and editorial board member of three other journals. Prof. Petrovskii published four books and more than one hundred articles in peer-reviewed journals. His research covers a broad variety of problems in ecology and population dynamics, with particular emphasis on the modelling of complex multiscale environmental and ecological systems.
Dr. Henri Laurie is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics of the University of Cape Town. He has a first degree in political philosophy and PhD in mathematical modelling. Dr. Laurie is expert in the spatial aspects of theoretical ecology, but has also published on mathematical education, industrial mathematics and field ecology. He believes that mathematical modelling is a profound way to combine philosophy, science and politics. He was a founding member of the Cape Town Ecology Group.
Professor Åke Brännström is an interdisciplinary mathematician at Umeå University, Sweden and Senior Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria. He has published more than fifty articles in peer-reviewed journals and organized more than a dozen international workshops and conferences. His contributions to theoretical ecology range from policy-oriented research to fundamental questions and supporting methodological developments.
Dr. György Barabás is a theoretical ecologist working at Linköping University, Sweden. His main research interests are species coexistence, eco-evolutionary dynamics, and understanding the stability and robustness of large ecological networks. His work addresses both basic, highly conceptual questions (e.g., limiting similarity and niche theory), as well as applied problems -- such as the extinction risk of species in the Baltic sea, and their expected consequences for ecosystem functioning and services.