Welcome Elizabeth Borer as new SE
Submitted by editor on 2 October 2015.
We're so happy to having recruited several new, great editors to Oikos lately. One of them is Elizabeth Borer, University of Minnesota, St Paul. Get to know her in the interview below and visit her website here:
What's you main research focus at the moment?
I'm an empirical ecologist broadly interested in community and ecosystem ecology. Many of the questions I ask are based in ecological theory but also link to ongoing global changes like diversity loss, invasion, and nitrogen deposition. I mostly work on grassland plants, insects, and viruses, but I dabble in lots of related areas, including forays into ecological theory and metagenomics. I'm one of the lead scientists and coordinators for the Nutrient Network, an international collaboration of researchers doing replicated experiments in nearly 100 grasslands spanning 20 countries on 6 continents.
Can you describe you research career?
I did my undergraduate work at a small school in Ohio where I experienced some of my first independent research failures in projects on seed production and dispersal. After a variety of semi-academic and non-academic jobs following completion of my bachelor's degree, I eventually went onto graduate school at UC Santa Barbara where I entered thinking I'd work on rapid evolution in urbanizing streams, but ended up writing my dissertation on coexistence of parasitoid wasps on a shared host in a biocontrol system in citrus. As a graduate student, I also started a discussion group on trophic cascades that ultimately generated more interesting work than my main PhD research topic. I went on to a postdoc at UC Berkeley then a second at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (a return to Santa Barbara), where I developed my interests in the theoretical similarity between disease-host, parasitoid-host, and predator-prey interactions. From there, I went on to a faculty position at Oregon State University and eventually moved to the University of Minnesota where I am now an Associate Professor in the Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior department.
How come that you became a scientist in ecology?
When I was an undergraduate I really enjoyed botany and insects, and I was told by a friend that if I did ecology, I could be paid to go camping and to identify and count plants and insects. As I did more undergraduate and graduate coursework, I became more deeply interested in the links between the mathematical theory of ecology and real organisms. The idea of general principles and relatively simple mathematics allowing us to make predictions about the natural world was intriguing to me. Now that I mostly work in my office writing grant proposals, R code, lecture materials, and responding to email, I am still intrigued by this link. Although I go camping with my family each year, I rarely get paid to camp and botanize at this point.
What do you do when you're not working?
In my non-work time, I enjoy swimming, canoeing, cross-country skiing, photography, cooking, gardening, and spending time with my family.
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