The lecture is free to attend and open to all, but registration is required in advance – book your seat via Eventbrite (external link).
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Meet our new professors
Guy Woodward, Professor of Ecology at Imperial College London
Climate change and pollution threaten the future of millions of interacting organisms within Darwin’s famous “entangled bank” of natural food webs and ecosystems. We face a huge challenge understanding and predicting the consequences of future changes in biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. To do so we need to identify if simple rules underpin the complex reality of the natural world.
Investigation of these rules in recent years has revealed important new findings, including evidence that ecosystems with more species can cope better with changes in temperature, and that pollutants can create “ecological surprises” through indirect effects in the food web.
Guy Woodward is a Professor of Ecology at Imperial College London. In his inaugural lecture he will discuss how network-based approaches can help us to unravel nature’s complexity to see the simple rules underneath, and use them to predict the environmental impacts of a wide range of stressors, from localised pesticide spills in the UK, to global warming in the Arctic.
About the speaker
Trained as a freshwater ecologist, Guy is a Professor in Ecology at Imperial College London in the Department of Life Sciences. Guy has a PhD in Freshwater Ecology and over 20 years of experience working on issues related to aquatic ecology. Through his work, Guy aims to develop a more integrated understanding of natural systems that spans multiple organisational levels (from genes to ecosystems), spatial and temporal scales, and disciplines.
Guy undertakes his research in the United Kingdom (UK), Iceland, and across the Arctic, and also works on global issues. Guy is the Principal Investigator of several research projects including a new Natural Environment Research Council Large Grant titled “Impacts of global warming in sentinel systems: from genes to ecosystems” (2015-2019 – £3.7m) to assess the resilience of natural systems in the face of climate change.
Guy is also actively involved in the science community as a supervisor to many postgraduate students, as well as holding positions as the Series Editor for Advances in Ecological Research, the Aquatic Group Co-Leader for the British Ecological Society and as a member of the Advisory Board for Ecolmpact in Switzerland and the Scientific Steering Committee for the global Future Earth EcoServices Project.