Striving for Work-life Balance Being an early career ecologist is tough. Launching an ecology career requires a lot of hard work and sacrifice as you seek to set a research agenda, build collaborations, write grants, and publish, publish, publish. This is all the more challenging if you want to have a life outside of your career. I went to graduate…
As scientists, one would think that we would approach all areas of our careers using the same evidence-based decision making that we use in our research. However, this is often not the case when it comes to teaching our college level science classes. Most new faculty have little training in best practices of effective instruction, and are left to “sink…
We are now accepting applications from late-stage graduate students and post docs for our 2017 Early Career Mentorship Program. The program pairs mentees with established ecologists who share similar career interests, based around the 2017 ESA Annual Meeting in Portland. Please spread the word!
Data and publishing Data publication has been a new endeavor for me and was not addressed during my training in graduate school. I have my first data publication out (Roberts et al. 2016) and have more in-progress. Given my recent look into this, I thought it would be worth posting this topic to prompt further discussion within early career ecologist…
Secretary’s Note: Below I have included the full meeting agenda that we began with, but we did not get to cover quite a bit of this at the meeting-proper. I have made efforts to distinguish what we did cover versus what we did not. M Aiello-Lammens Attendees: Brief Introductions Discussion of our views on the role(s) our…
The Early Career Ecologist Section has been busy proposing, organizing, and collaborating to offer many events and resources in the near future. See our page for ESA 2016 for more details on these and other events! They include: An Early Career Section Booth – Come and visit! We’ve worked to make this a Parent-Friendly meeting. See our Blog Post. Our…
or “Who the hell am I to talk about this issue, anyways?!” Late last year, I was asked to write a blog for the Early Career Ecologist Section of the ESA, and I initially chose to focus it on a rather controversial topic: gender bias in academia. Now, the truth is that I’ve been a bit hesitant to get my…
My name is Eric Gustafson and I am a landscape ecologist who specializes in forest landscape simulation modeling, particularly with the LANDIS-II model (http://www.landis-ii.org/). I received my PhD from Purdue University in 1992, and have been a Research Ecologist for the Northern Research Station of the U.S. Forest Service since then. I am tempted to list my accomplishments so that…
My friends from grad school knew me as the go-getter, the one with boundless energy and capacity to do “all the things!” During my PhD career, I juggled (largely successfully) multiple side research and writing projects, leading a local chapter for the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB), organizing BBQ’s and parties, a long-distance partner, and a voracious novel-reading habit along…
We are excited to announce that our long-range planning grant has been funded by ESA, which will allow us to run a semi-formal Early Career Mentoring Program at ESA 2016 in Ft. Lauderdale!
Lessons learned so far I am just a couple of days away from starting my second semester as an Assistant Professor, and it seems like a good time to reflect on what I’ve learned so far. First, a brief background. I received a PhD in Ecology and Evolution from Stony Brook University in April 2014. I began a postdoc at…
As a professional society and a generation of early career ecologists, I’d argue that collectively we’re more aware of the importance of diversity than ever before. ESA has a diversity statement, dedicated diversity staff, and multiple programs focused on maintaining and improving a diverse community of ecologists. And with good reasons – our community’s own traditional currency, published peer reviewed…