Today we are welcoming two more Associate Editors to the Methods in Ecology and Evolution who were invited to work with the journal following our open call earlier this year. Jessica Royles joins from the University of Cambridge, UK and Simon Blomberg is coming to us from the University of Queensland, Australia. You can find out more about both of them below.
Simon Blomberg
“I am a statistician who started out as a lizard demographer. I am interested in all applications of statistics in evolutionary biology and systematics. It is my passion to see that good science gets done by everybody, and sound statistical methods are essential to reach that goal. My research involves the application of stochastic process models (predominantly Itoh diffusions) to the macroevolution of quantitative traits. I believe that evolution can be described by beautiful mathematics but theory must be tested with data. I have published widely on phylogenetic comparative methods. I use Bayesian methods, data augmentation, regularisation and other modern and traditional statistical methods. I am interested in how to treat missing data. I still like lizards. Also jazz.”
Simon has been working on stochastic process models for a couple of years. His most recent article ‘Beyond Brownian motion and the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process: Stochastic diffusion models for the evolution of quantitative characters‘ is now available on BioRxiv and he would welcome comments on it from the Methods community.
Jessica Royles
“I am interested in the impact of climate change on plant physiology and specialise in using stable isotopes as environmental markers. Having worked in Antarctica I have strong interests in polar biology, high latitude peatlands and fieldwork techniques. My current work focusses on temperate bryophytes and I am interested in using techniques including gas exchange and chlorophyll fluorescence at different spatial scales to link the leaf level to the ecosystem level.”
Jessica’s most recently published article – ‘Widespread Biological Response to Rapid Warming on the Antarctic Peninsula‘ – describes how she and her co-authors used moss cores to study Antarctic warming due to climate change. The article builds on her previous paper ‘Plants and Soil Microbes Respond to Recent Warming on the Antarctic Peninsula‘. Jessica is currently working on a Moss Ecophysiology project which aims to investigate the value of mosses as tools to understand past climate.
We are thrilled to welcome Simon and Jessica to the Associate Editor Board and we look forward to working with them over the coming years.
Methods Blog 