University of Michigan
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

EEB recent graduate, Dr. Susanna Messinger, accepted a  Gaylord Donnelley Postdoctoral Environmental Fellowship through the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies (YIBS). Four Donnelley Fellowships are awarded each year. It's a two year fellowship that Messinger will begin in July.

Messinger’s sponsor, Dr. David Vasseur, is interested in how environmental fluctuations influence population and community dynamics and more recently has been delving into the realm of eco-evolutionary dynamics.

“I am also going to be collaborating with Dr. Mark Urban at the University of Connecticut who studies the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that shape communities over different spatial scales,” she said. “I will be starting a project to study predator evolution in a spatial context. The idea is that spatial structure can induce eco-evolutionary feedbacks that significantly affect predator evolution and thus will play an important role in population dynamics as well as the structure and stability of complex communities. I will be building up from theory that I developed here as a graduate student and will attempt to test some of this theory using small predators, like protozoans or Daphnia. I'm particularly excited by the prospect of bridging theoretical and experimental data, since this is not often done!”

Messinger’s EEB advisor was Professor Annette Ostling.