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Prof Samraat Pawar
No more applications being accepted
Competition Funded PhD Project (European/UK Students Only)
About the Project
Co-Supervisor: Guy-Bart Stan, Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London (South Kensington campus)
The Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) is supporting 15 PhD studentships within a new Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) focused on Science and Solutions for a Changing Planet. This brings together Imperial College London’s world leading expertise with that of our partners to offer a unique world-class multidisciplinary PhD training programme. The DTP will provide students with in-depth, advanced research training, as well as training in professional and transferable skills. Partners will offer training and secondment opportunities designed to enhance the students’ employability. Those partners with business and government experience will also provide skills coaching in policy, regulation, and entrepreneurship.
Climatic temperature first and directly impacts ecological systems by changing the metabolic rate (rate of energy use) of individual organisms. Therefore, understanding how temperature-driven changes in individual metabolism scale up to the dynamics of whole networks of interacting individuals and species (e.g., food webs) is key for predicting impacts of climate change on ecosystems. The student will use a novel combination of metabolic theory, dynamical network (graph) theory, and a massive database on the thermal responses of metabolic traits to address key questions about the effects of climatic fluctuations on population interaction networks underlying complex ecosystems. The study will pay particular attention to the consequences of mismatches in thermal responses of metabolic traits of interacting species on the dynamics (energy flows) and stability of consumer-resource systems. Such mismatches are becoming increasingly common as new species are introduced into ecosystems through climate-driven range shifts or direct human transportation.
The student will have the freedom to choose what specific questions she/he would like to ask within this framework. Some examples are: (i) To what extent will thermal responses of fluxes in complex networks of consumer-resource interactions (food webs) mirror the thermal responses of individual physiology? (ii) Will between-species mismatches in thermal responses destabilize ecosystems in a changing climate? (iii) What motifs of interaction network structure strongly determine the thermal responses of whole ecosystem dynamics, and can therefore be used to mitigate climate change impacts? (iv) What network motifs are most likely to experience species losses due to temperature changes? All these questions are fundamental for understanding the effects of climate change on stability of complex ecosystems, and will generate empirically-grounded predictions that can be tested using burgeoning data on ecological network-level effects of climatic warming.
The Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) is supporting 15 PhD studentships within a new Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) focused on Science and Solutions for a Changing Planet. This brings together Imperial College London’s world leading expertise with that of our partners to offer a unique world-class multidisciplinary PhD training programme. The DTP will provide students with in-depth, advanced research training, as well as training in professional and transferable skills. Partners will offer training and secondment opportunities designed to enhance the students’ employability. Those partners with business and government experience will also provide skills coaching in policy, regulation, and entrepreneurship.
Climatic temperature first and directly impacts ecological systems by changing the metabolic rate (rate of energy use) of individual organisms. Therefore, understanding how temperature-driven changes in individual metabolism scale up to the dynamics of whole networks of interacting individuals and species (e.g., food webs) is key for predicting impacts of climate change on ecosystems. The student will use a novel combination of metabolic theory, dynamical network (graph) theory, and a massive database on the thermal responses of metabolic traits to address key questions about the effects of climatic fluctuations on population interaction networks underlying complex ecosystems. The study will pay particular attention to the consequences of mismatches in thermal responses of metabolic traits of interacting species on the dynamics (energy flows) and stability of consumer-resource systems. Such mismatches are becoming increasingly common as new species are introduced into ecosystems through climate-driven range shifts or direct human transportation.
The student will have the freedom to choose what specific questions she/he would like to ask within this framework. Some examples are: (i) To what extent will thermal responses of fluxes in complex networks of consumer-resource interactions (food webs) mirror the thermal responses of individual physiology? (ii) Will between-species mismatches in thermal responses destabilize ecosystems in a changing climate? (iii) What motifs of interaction network structure strongly determine the thermal responses of whole ecosystem dynamics, and can therefore be used to mitigate climate change impacts? (iv) What network motifs are most likely to experience species losses due to temperature changes? All these questions are fundamental for understanding the effects of climate change on stability of complex ecosystems, and will generate empirically-grounded predictions that can be tested using burgeoning data on ecological network-level effects of climatic warming.
Funding Notes
Scholarships are available for full-time postgraduate students from the UK/EC demonstrating exceptional academic merit or potential, to carry out research in selected fields of interest. Scholarships cover tuition fees, bursary of £15,726 p.a. and £5,000 for consumables and travel, and will be funded for a maximum of 3.5 years; however EC students are only eligible for a fees-only award (see NERC eligibility criteria at http://www.nerc.ac.uk/funding/available/postgrad/eligibility.asp). The Grantham Institute for Climate Change will also be contributing a few scholarships to the DTP cohort; these scholarships are available to UK and International students and cover a bursary and home fees only.
Project supervisors
Career overview
Samraat Pawar is a Professor of Theoretical Ecology in the Department of Life Sciences at Silwood Park, part of the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Imperial College London. His research focuses on understanding how individual-level metabolism scales up through species interactions to influence community and ecosystem-level dynamics. He is affiliated with several research initiatives, including the Ecosystems and the Environment, the Georgina Mace Centre for the Living Planet, and the Grantham Institute. Prof. Pawar is multilingual, proficient in English, Marathi, Hindi, Spanish (Latin American), and Sanskrit.
Research interests
Professor Pawar''s research focuses on how individual-level metabolism scales up through species interactions to community and ecosystem-level dynamics. His areas of interest include ecology, ecological impacts of climate change, ecosystem function, evolutionary impacts of climate change, microbial ecology, community ecology (excluding invasive species ecology), biological physics, and biological mathematics.
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