My overall objective is to run a research group working in mathematical and theoretical biology, with a focus on ecology, evolution, and behavior and the broad goal of combining first-rate basic science with important applied questions. We use mathematical methods to solve problems in biological and ecological science (rather than problems in biological and ecological science to motivate mathematical studies). Our group is collaborative, sharing ideas and working together. Currently, the main themes in the group are 1) Quantitative Methods for Fishery Management: We are developing the tools that will be needed to make Ecosystem Based Fishery Management (EBFM) a practicable approach for fishery management in the 21st century. A wide range of tools is needed, and so our work covers a wide variety of methods and systems. 2) Evolutionary Aspects of Health and Disease: We are interested in aging in the context of life histories of organisms, the evolutionary ecology oxidative stress and antioxidant defenses, how one can adaptively manage disease interventions, the developmental origins of health and disease, and most recently the evolutionary ecology of stem cells and their niches. The group is unified by the tools we use: models (differential equations, stochastic dynamic programming and Bayesian statistical methods), experiments (either here in Santa Cruz or in collaboration with colleagues elsewhere) and field observations. We apply these ideas to a variety of systems, currently including southern ocean krill, steelhead trout, diving mammals, Pacific rockfish, mosquitos that are malarial vectors, and stem cells. Although I worked for many years on insect parasitoids and tephritid fruit flies, we are not doing much with insects just now, although I continue to think about restarting an empirical program (on compensatory growth) using insects as a model system.
You can also look at my entire eprint list (Eprint list ) and at brief summaries of grants in the last five years.
"Models for early growth and its tradeoff", 27th Larval Fish Conference, Santa Cruz, August 2003
"Environmental Variability and the Squid Fishery", Symposium of the Conference, California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations Annual Conference, November 2003
"The Method of Multiple (Spatial) Hypotheses and the Decline of Steller Sea Lions in western Alaska", Zoological Society of London Symposium on Management of Marine Ecosystems: Monitoring Change in Upper Trophic Levels, April 2004
"Separating Environmental Science and Environmentalism in the Study of Marine Reserves", Fifth Mote Symposium, Sarasota, November 2004
"The Evolutionary Demography of Dietary Restriction", First Workshop on Evolutionary Biodemography, University of Virginia,Charlottesville, VA, October 2005
"Uncertainty in Ecological Analysis: A Retrospective and Prospective", Workshop on Uncertainty in Ecological Analysis, Mathematical Biosciences Institute, Ohio State University, April 2006
"Understanding the Decline of The Western Alaskan Steller Sea Lion: Assessing the Evidence Concerning Multiple Hypothesis", Frohlich Fellow Lecture, CSIRO Hobart, October 2006
"Combining proximate and ultimate approaches to understand life-history variation in salmonids, with application to fisheries, conservation, and aquaculture". Invited Talk, Sixth William R. and Lenore Mote International Symposium In Fisheries Ecology, November 2006
"Life History Plasticity and Stock Assessments: Beyond the von Bertalanffy". Invited Talk, American Institute of Fishery Research Biologists 50th Anniversary Symposium on The Future of Fishery Science in North America, February 2007
"Coming Out of the Ivory Tower: How to make sure that our modelling efforts remain applied and practical?" Guest Speaker, Populations Under Pressure. A graduate research symposium in applied population biology. Imperial College Centre for Population Biology at Silwood Park, March 2007
"Ecology, Conservation and Public Policy: A Vision for the 21st Century", Astor Lecture, University of Oxford, April 2007
"Why We Age, What Causes Us to Age, and What Can Be Done About It", Synergy Lecture, University of California Santa Cruz, May 2007
"Natural Resource Modelng in the 21st Century", Plenary Lecture, 25th Meeting of the Resource Modeling Association, Cape Cod, June 2007
"Compensatory Growth, Metabolic Syndrome, and Hormesis: Three Sides of the Same Life History Coin", Thematic Topic on Evolutionary Ecology of Senescence, Annual Meeting of the British Ecology Society, Sept 2007
"Understanding the decline of the western Alaskan Steller sea lion: An ecological thriller" and "The Keystone Species and the Ultraviolet Catastrophe: Southern Ocean Krill, Krill Predators and Krill Fishery Management in a Changing Climate". W.V. Kaeser Lectures, University of Wisconsin, March 2008