As I was reading through Adam Grant’s recent book Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, a quote he references by Einstein made me think about the ideas that early career scientists generate: “A person who has not made great contributions to science by the age of 30 will never do so.” This quote got me thinking about how the landscape…

I was first exposed to the notion of corporate engagement when I read a New Yorker piece that featured interviews with Peter Kareiva and Mark Tercek.  Peter is former Chief Scientist at The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and Mark is a former executive at Goldman Sachs and now CEO of TNC.  TNC and other big conservation NGOs have really advanced the…

Call for ESA Mentors! Early Career Mentoring Program Ecological Society of America Meeting, Portland, 2017 If you are interested in becoming a potential ESA Mentor and will be attending the 2017 meeting in Portland, please fill out our ECMP Google form by April 20, 2017. Description: Conferences provide unique opportunities for biologists to interact with others in their field; however,…

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…

As the early bird deadline for the ESA Annual Meeting in Fort Lauderdale approaches (Thursday!), you might want to know about some parent accommodations that will be available there:   Lactation rooms at the conference center for nursing and pumping mothers. Private, quiet, and clean rooms for moms to nurse their babies or to pump breast milk. These rooms will…

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…