Update:  Fall 2007.   I am no longer taking graduate students in anticipation of my retirement.  I am one of those "boomers" who plans to retire early and keep working.  My choice in retirement is to keep working on my scholarship and interacting with students, and volunteering to teach a course once in a while.  I also am open to serving on students' thesis/dissertation committees in areas of my research interests. 

Here is some information to assist you in applying to UC Davis to work in the field of ecology:

 Differences between Population Biology and Ecology: Both graduate groups provide education in population and community ecology. Here is a summary of the two groups:

• Population Biology. Its curriculum emphasizes providing every student with a foundation in both ecology and evolution focusing at the population level and in quantitative skills that are required for any study of populations. Funding is guaranteed by the graduate group, which in turn means that admissions is highly limited and selective. Admissions is therefore not contingent on a single faculty member accepting a student; although at least one faculty member must have enough interest in a student to serve as a first-year guide, students do not commit to a Major Professor until sometime in their second year. In this way, all faculty are committed to the graduate students as a whole and students have their first year to explore their interests before committing to a specific area of research.

• Ecology.  Its curriculum emphasizes providing every student with a foundation in all ecological fields and is structured around specific and often applied subdisciplines called "Areas of Emphasis". AOE's fitting my research interests include Conservation Biology, Restoration Ecology, Ecosystems and Landscape Ecology and Integrative Ecology. Admissions is currently AOE-specific, meaning that students need to declare an AOE in their application. No AOE can provide guaranteed support, although the Graduate Group has some limited fellowships and other funds for successful applicants. Thus support is tied to a specific Major Professor and necessarily so is admission. While students can switch Major Professors if their interests change, there is no guarantee that another faculty member will agree to sponsor any given student wishing to change.

My current research interests and philosophy of educating graduate students.

My research expertise focuses on population ecology, which unites the research that I have done over my career. I have done research on a variety of taxa (amphibians, insects, birds, plants), in a variety of environments (tropics, desert, arctic). Currently, I do the majority of my research at the long-term study site that I established in the sand-dune ecosystems on the north shore of Mono Lake in Great Basin desert. Most of my time is now spent on a long-term demographic study of perennial shrubs along a successional (i.e., spatiotemporal) gradient created as Mono Lake has regressed over the last several thousand years. Other projects include study of the demography and mating systems of some insect species inhabiting the dunes (particularly bee flies, family Bombyliidae).

Whether a student is completing a Master's or a Ph.D., I prefer that my students work in a conceptual area close to that of my current research projects and at the Mono Basin study site. My philosophy is that I can be the best mentor if the student is working in close proximity to my on-going work, both conceptually and geographically. For a Ph. D. student, I expect the student to design and complete her or his own project independently, so I do not dictate what a Ph.D. student does for research. However, if the student's research is close to my own, there are two other benefits aside from the obvious one that I know enough to give good advice: 1. I can be much better able to provide funding for the student through my grants; and 2. the student can greatly benefit from working closely with me, learning by the example that I can provide on how research is done and also collaborating on projects of mutual interest. I expect a Ph.D. student to demonstrate the ability to be an independent scholar, and so therefore I do not require that my name be on the papers published from a Ph.D. dissertation. At the same time, I encourage and enjoy collaborative projects with my current and former graduate students that, I hope, will augment the number of papers that they publish. Because of the realities of graduate school and life thereafter, I require that all Ph.D. students present their dissertation as three major published papers or submitted manuscripts.

For a Master's student, I prefer to provide the student with a project, for reasons related to the shorter duration of a Master's degree. The Master's student has too little time and also often too little experience to develop a feasible project of conceptual significance; rather the Master's student wishes to get substantial experience quickly and with a high probability of success. Unlike a Ph.D., a Master's degree program is designed to provide students with further education in a topic and not to produce independent scholars at that level. A Master's degree is ideal for exploring interests, for tooling up in particular skills, and for practicing the process of science under more guidance than would be allowed in a Ph.D. program. I encourage Master's students to present their Master's thesis as a one published paper or submitted manuscript, which would typically be co-authored by myself.

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