Keynote Speakers

Elisa Schaum
Junior Professor, Institute of Marine Ecosystem and Fishery Science (IMF) Centre for Earth System Research and Sustainability (CEN) University of Hamburg

An oceanographer turned evolutionary biologist, I investigate what makes and breaks the adaptive potential of large marine microbial populations. We know that this potential is generally large, but what makes some populations better than others at coping with an increasingly weird, increasingly unpredictable environment in the long-term? Apart from pure curiosity, there is ecological reasoning to this madness, as these microbes are the foundations of aquatic food-webs and biogeochemical cycles. Changes on the microbial level will inevitable have major repercussions on aquatic ecosystems. In my lab, we examine climate change through the lens of evolutionary biology (Under which circumstances do we expect organisms to evolve and how fast, and how much? Can we predict evolution?) and oceanography (What are the ecological repercussions of rapid evolutionary responses? How can we regale our modeller collaborators with better data?). Projects include but are not limited to investigating the roles of marine viruses, species interactions, and environmental variability, in a changing world. We use methods spanning experimental evolution set-ups in the laboratory, physiological and molecular analyses, and field work (sometimes on research vessels).

Morgan W. Tingley
Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UCLA

Morgan Tingley joined the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2020, after previously serving as an Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut and as a David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellow at Princeton University. He holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to this, he received a B.A. from Harvard University and an M.Sc. from Oxford University. He is a Fellow of the American Ornithological Society, with whom he currently serves as an Elected Councilor, and a research associate with the Institute for Bird Populations. He is a recipient of the “Wings across the Americas” conservation award from the U.S. Forest Service and the Young Professional Award from the Cooper Ornithological Society. His more than 70 research papers, primarily about how birds respond to a changing environment, have been covered widely by the popular press, including features by The New York Times, LA Times, and Washington Post.