Constucted Climates

Overview:

I now study urban environmental issues. I've just finished a new book ("Constructed Climates: A primer on urban environments") on urban ecology and ecosystem services in cities, linking urban heat islands, air and water quality, asthma and other health problems, global warming, energy and carbon footprints, and social equity issues. That book is freely available as a website at www.constructedclimates.org, and some additional information on my website here. I've terminated my past research program on theoretical evolutionary ecology (read below). Below I cover how one research program began and ended, and a new one came to be. In my view it serves as an anecdote for the problems facing American universities: the emphasis on jobs rather than knowledge.

Birth of a Research Program: As I recall, sometime around 1968 I decided to be a scientist. In 1978, I graduated from high school, with big interests in computer programming and physics. In 1988, I earned my Physics Ph.D. at the University of Hawai'i for my work studying phase transition models within the subfield of condensed matter theory. In 1998, I was awarded my one and only NSF research grant to understand theoretical mechanisms behind digging and grazing foraging strategies. In 2008, as a tenured Associate Professor of Biology at Duke University, and after a decade of grant proposal rejections and no new financial support, I've terminated my research on theoretical evolutionary ecology. I don't know what 2018 will bring.

Although theory is cheap, it isn't free. A scientist --- even a theoretical ecologist --- needs research funds to attend meetings and have an active lab that supports a vibrant collection of students and postdocs. Programs that might fund my research sit primarily within the National Science Foundation, but funding rates in these programs hover around six to eight percent. Although I've had a thrilling (in a nerdy sort of way) run of research projects and collaborators on a shoestring budget, even the shoestring's been cut. In any event, with no hope for support to reconstitute an active, original-research program on the $300/year available to me, I've terminated my theoretical ecology and evolution studies. I've had no funding since 2001, and after a dozen or so proposal rejections over the last decade (as well as publishing some 30+ scientific papers and a book), I've finally accepted the notion that these research interests have no funding potential. I'm not exactly sure why I can't get funding. I have several hypotheses spanning mechanistic levels from my own abilities to commercialized universities up to national priorities during the Bush years. However, dwelling on past problems does not lead to a constructive future. I look back and remain proud of my commitment to the discipline, and the work I did, and am pleased with the understanding I've gained.

A tenured faculty position, with its academic freedom and security, represents a wonderful opportunity to change directions and study new things. It is distressing to see American universities pull back from tenured positions as they focus on job training and pull back from basic arts and sciences. Tenured faculty have the academic freedom to pursue one's own academic interests as they develop and change, and make significant changes based on factors as diverse as curiosity to social importance. With this freedom, I want to make commitments that have value, either personally or socially. Looking back, studying theoretical ecology had great personal value through my own fascination, but continuing a high quality research program in that area ran up against the lack of value of ecology to our national science priorities, as well as the low value the ecological community places on theoretical questions.

New Academic Focus: Looking forward, there are many environmental problems that deserve commitments. (It would be somehow satisfying if the Republican "War on Science" pushed scientists out of research and into environmental and social activism!) Over the last few years, my service on the Durham City/County Open Space and Trails Commission (follow the links on my main page) posed interesting questions concerning urban ecology. These questions have value to society, whether society knows it or not, making a focus on that area a valuable academic commitment. I'm following those interests, and I've placed here information and links to literature from an "ecosystem services" seminar I led. Over the last year I drafted a book, "Constructed Climates: A primer on urban environments" (check it out: www.constructedclimates.org), which I hope informs students and environmentalists on issues related to urban open space. It provides quite a technical foundation to the function of urban nature, in essence urban ecosystem services. It's being published by The University of Chicago Press, scheduled to come out in 2011.

Of course, I still have no funding, but I'm doing what I can without it and, I hope, making commitments with value even without funding. In particular, I'm very interested in serving on boards and commissions with environmental concerns and important missions.

Here's some more details of my research life after my Ph.D.:
Starting in 1988 I spent five enjoyable years at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. There I developed research interests with various collaborators: 1) fluid flow through porous media problems with Bill Laidlaw; 2) seismic image enhancement with Kris Vasudevan; 3) spatial predator-prey theory with Ed McCauley and Andre de Roos; and 4) floral evolution with Lawrence Harder.

I then went to the University of California at Santa Barbara to work with Roger Nisbet. Interactions with Roger, Russ Schmitt, and Craig Osenberg, laid the foundation of my present work on resouce-consumer models.

I then gained a faculty position in the Department of Zoology (now Biology) at Duke University in 1996 with a position offered through the Center for Nonlinear and Complex Systems.

My interests span theoretical evolutionary ecology, and my approaches include both mathematics and individual-based simulation models. Along these lines I've examined a variety of single- and multiple-species systems to understand how spatial extensions affect population-level dynamics. An ongoing interest is the connection of theoretical and empirical systems.

Specific topics I'm working on include (as of 3/1/01): resource-consumer interactions (with several collaborators); animal grouping; hermaphroditism-dioecy mating system models (with L. Harder); obligate mutualism-exploiter systems (with W. Morris and J. Bronstein).

3/14/2010