People
The Salgo Team is constituted by an interdisciplinary group of 3 postdocs, 4 PhD students (plus 9 externally advised), 2 MSc students, and 2 BSc students based at the University of Oxford, with partner (visiting) institutions at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (Germany), the Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science (Australia), iDiv (Germany), and Peking University (China), among others.
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Institution: University of Sheffield Primary supervisor: Prof Mark Rees Email: saujla1@sheffield.ac.uk Twitter: @EvoEcoSim His PhD combines field experiments, lab work, and structured population modeling to quantify the demography of carnivorous plants. He is investigating how vital rates within Drosera rotundifolia populations vary under different nitrogen deposition regimes, and incorporating spatial inter/intraspecific competition to population models of Drosophyllum lusitanicum. |
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Institution: University of Leeds, UK Primary supervisor: Dr Maria Beger Email: bsjic@leeds.ac.uk Twitter: @I_CAN_actually His PhD examines how local environments influence the demographics of different populations. He is focusing on the demographic strategies of marginal high latitude coral communities and how they compare with those of more prominent tropical reef systems, as well as on macroecological analyses of demographic resilience. |
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Fiona Chung Institution: University of Hull & University of Leeds Primary supervisors: Dr Magnus Johnson & Dr Maria Beger Email: f.chong-2019@hull.ac.uk Twitter: @whowantsachong CV: For her PhD, Fiona is exploring the spatio-temporal dynamics of subtropical coral populations, identifying demographic and functional traits that allow coral population persistence in high latitude marginal environments under climate change. |
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Institution: University of Aarhus, Denmark Primary supervisor: Dr Alejo Ordoñez Email: erik.kusch@au.dk Twitter: @KuschErik CV: His PhD assesses the efficacy of different species-dependency network approaches using a multitude of data sets at different spatial extents and of varying data quality. This will lead to an improved understanding of extinction debt within and across trophic levels of species networks on local and global scales. Within his research, he focuses heavily on reproducibility through soft-coding and software development in the form of R Packages. |
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Institution: Martin Luther University & iDiv, Germany Primary supervisor: Prof Tiffany Knight Email: sam.levin@idiv.de Twitter: @SamLevin5 CV: His PhD examines the environmental drivers of demography of an invasive succulent Carpobrotus edulis in eight countries around the globe. He is also developing new software to query demographic databases and build user-specified integral projection models. |
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Laura Merritt Institution: University of Reading and CEH, UK Primary supervisor: Prof James Bullock Email: l.e.a.merritt@pgr.reading.ac.uk Twitter: @batsmad. Her PhD uses modelling to investigate species range shifts under climate change. She is exploring selection of dispersal kernels for animal data based on behavioural and landscape traits. |
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Institution: University of California, Berkeley Primary supervisor: Dr Ben Blonder Email: caray@berkeley.edu Twitter: @RattleBeary CV: Her work explores how species interactions, dispersal, and environmental context shape community assembly outcomes. To address her questions, Courtenay uses demographic models, long-term population monitoring, and experimental approaches. Most of her work is with alpine plants and quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) in the Rocky Mountains, Colorado. She also has active work in the Norwegian tundra and Sonoran Desert, Arizona. |
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Institution: University of Sheffield, UK Primary supervisor: Prof Dylan Childs Email: srolph1@sheffield.ac.uk Twitter: @simon_rolph His PhD capitalises on comparative analyses of population models to provide insight into fundamental and applied questions about the nature of life history trade-offs and responses to environmental change. He is using the COMPADRE Plant Matrix Database alongside population modelling tools, integral projection models (IPMs) and matrix population models (MPMs), to produce simulated population models as an investigative framework for identifying best practices for comparative analyses. |
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Institution: Rio de Janeiro State University, Brazil Primary supervisor: Dr Maja Kajin Email: ssantos.gabriel@gmail.com Twitter: @anycommonname CV: His PhD includes the development of a framework based on second derivatives of population growth rate to test hypotheses on how animals respond to climate change, including demographic buffering and demographic lability. |