October has been an exciting month as we welcome Josh Brian and María Ángeles Pérez-Navarro to our lab group – and Junru Shen to London after she’s been doing her PhD remotely for a year!
María Ángeles has a PhD in Terrestrial Ecology (CREAF-UAB, 2020), and her research is mainly focused on understanding and predicting species distribution changes with global change. During her previous research at CREAF as a post-doctoral researcher, she investigated the impact of canopy-recruit interactions on climatic debt and analysed the differences in performance of planted and natural tree forest species. During her PhD, she analysed the relationship between species niche and population and communities responses to extreme climatic events, trying to disentangle some of the impacts of climatic variability driven by climate change on plant ecosystems.
Josh has recently completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge, studying the community ecology of freshwater mussel parasites and the implications for the conservation of their hosts. Prior to that, he worked on the diversity and ecology of the symbionts of coral reefs in Timor-Leste. He is interested generally in community ecology, symbiosis and invasion biology.
María Ángeles and Josh will both be working on our AlienImpacts project. We’re delighted to have them in the group and are really excited about the fun science that is now in store!
Ecological Change 