I am recruiting a Ph.D. student to work on projects centered on understanding how patterns in social behavior of mixed-species foraging collectives in situ scale up to affect the dynamics and state of ecosystems. The development of new quantitative tools to complement large datasets from the field (primarily from coral reef fishes) is a critical part of this research program and, thus, I am particularly interested in students with strong mathematics, computer science, and/or physics backgrounds who want to tackle big questions in ecology. Ideal candidates will have an interest in one or more of the following types of approaches that our research group is actively pursuing:
- machine learning and computer vision applied to tracking fish collectives in complex natural settings
- dynamical modeling of coupled populations (e.g., fishes, corals, algae)
- agent based modeling of large-scale community foraging dynamics
- agent based and/or dynamic state variable modeling of the evolutionary origins and fitness consequences of sociality in mixed-species foraging collectives
Interested students can find additional information about my new lab at CU Boulder on our website (https://gillab.org/), including details on how to reach out to me: https://gillab.org/join/
