Category Archives: education
PhD opportunities in Theoretical Ecosystem Ecology with Ford Ballantyne [PhD Position]
I went to graduate school with Ford and would strongly recommend that those looking for PhD opportunities on the quantitative side of ecosystem ecology consider the opportunity below. Ford is a smart guy, doing cool work, and he knows an awful lot about math, so it’s probably pretty hard to go wrong (and yes, we’re still friends so I’m totally biased).
The Ballantyne Lab at the University of Kansas is looking to recruit up to two graduate students for the fall of 2010. Current research is focused on modeling ecosystem stoichiometry, nutrient dynamics, microbial decomposition of soil carbon, systems-level regulation of metabolism, spatially explicit populations and the trophic structure of communities. Although most of our experiments are performed with phytoplankton and bacteria in the lab, the KU field station, 20 minutes from campus, is a great resource that is home to long-term studies of community assembly. Please direct inquiries to Ford Ballantyne (fb4 [at] ku [dot] edu). For more information about graduate study in the lab and EEB at KU please look at http://www.people.ku.edu/~fb4 and http://www2.ku.edu/%7Eeeb/graduate/ and http://www.kuerg.ku.edu/.
Starting young: getting ecologists to blog
Within the small community of ecologist bloggers much has been of the lack of blogging (and other odd pursuits like twittering) among ecologists (this is, afterall, EEB & Flow‘s raison d’etre), and I recently read over at academHacK that “in the future [academics] can be online or be irrelevant”. So, this semester I did what I could to get some future ecologists blogging. Instead of having traditional writing assignments for my Biogeography course I required students to set up a blog and post at least 3 EEB & Flow style posts about papers they read from the primary literature (I didn’t know about EEB & Flow at the time, but this was/is the spirit of the assignment). The response so far has been very positive and at least a couple of students (mostly of the graduate persuasion) have taken to blogging in a way that suggests to me that they’ll do this again in the future (i.e., they’ve already posted more posts than required even though they already know that they’ve locked down an A).
In my broader experience with introducing ecologists to new technology it’s really all about exposing folks to the potential of the new approach. Once they’ve seen the potential of something ecologists tend to embrace it pretty quickly. So, start your students young. Show them how easy it is to set up a blog, get them posting a little, and maybe soon we’ll all be clammering to be heard above crowd.
