Biography

A Scientist in training (and self-diagnosed theoretical ecologist) who loves playing outside in the mountains and wants to understand why communities are structured the way that they are. Being the maths geek nerd that I am my PhD has taken on a distinctly computational flavour and aims to help us improve our understanding and ability to make more global generalisations about ecological communities - although I sometimes find myself reverting back to my ‘microecology’ roots and getting caught up in the weeds at times 🙈. Current interests include (but are not limited to): ecological networks, species traits, the role of scale and how all that fits together as a member of the amazing (if you ask me) Poisot Lab along with a (seemingly) ever growing list of side projects.

A plant ecologist by inclination I can usually be found gushing about how cute a particular grass (or succulent) is, hanging off of the side of a mountain or going on bike-ventures to various coffee shops. When the weather forces me indoors I’m most likely spending way more time than I need to trying to automate a process that could be done in a few minutes, exercising my creative side (I produce a fortnightly comic for the Ecology for the Masses blog) or trying to find new (and pretty) ways in which to visualise data and results i.e. combining my geeky self with my artistic alter-ego.

Interests

• Computational approaches to ecological questions
• FAIR and Open Science
• Data visualisation
• Dabbling in artistic pursuits

Education

• MSc in Ecology and Biodiversity, 2020

Stockholms Universitet | Sweden

• BSc (Hons) in Plant Sciences, 2017

University of Pretoria | South Africa

Recent Publications

Food web reconstruction through phylogenetic transfer of low-rank network representation

Methods in Ecology and Evolution

Preprint

A Roadmap Toward Predicting Species Interaction Networks (Across Space and Time)

In Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B

SVD entropy reveals the high complexity of ecological networks

In Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution

Preprint

Projects

Project Wombat

Wombling (not about actual wombats); edge detection; spatial boundaries; and how we can apply this to ecological networks.

Project One Ring

What does the future of predicting networks look like? And what types of questions should we be asking?

Project Pokédex

Network reconstruction; phylogenetic inference; network embedding

Project Malcolm

Singular Value Decomposition; network complexity; network prediction and possibly some network assembly.

TidyTuesday

An R4DS weekly data project initiative emphasising the use of tidyverse to summarise and visualise data

Recent & Upcoming Talks

Designing a Collective Prototype of Future Tropical and Subtropical Science

In this session, Early Career Researchers will redesign the tropical and subtropical science of the future through collective speculative thinking.

Taking FAIR and open science to the field - The evolution of the PFTC field course

A case study on integrating open science and reproducibility into field course training and teaching, and the effect it has on participant experience.