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Fields of study
Theoretical ecology – disease ecology
Academic background
I received my Ph.D degree in 1995 from the Joint Program of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I was awarded a U.S. Department of Energy Alexander Hollaender Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship for studies at Princeton, and more recently, a Centennial Fellowship in Global and Complex Systems from the James S. McDonnell Foundation. I am currently affiliated with the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at UM and with the Santa Fe Institute as an external faculty.
Graduate students
Sarah Cobey, Andres Baeza, Edward Baskerville
Postdoctoral fellow
Katia Koelle
News
Google PageRank inspired coextinction research
Former postdoctoral fellow Stefano Allesina and Professor Mercedes Pascual created an algorithm inspired by Google’s PageRank, which rates Web pages based on pages that link to them. They applied their algorithm to a different kind of web – food webs. Their research was published in the online journal PLoS Computational Biology in September 2009.
The algorithm uses the links between species in a food web, which describes the complex eating relationships between species, to determine the relative importance of various species. Their research forms the basis for a more comprehensive treatment of extinction risk in ecosystems. Allesina just moved from a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Center for Ecological Synthesis, University of California at Santa Barbara, to an assistant professorship at the University of Chicago. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral fellow in Pascual's lab. See New York Times and BBC articles.
Food-web theme issue editor
Professor Mercedes Pascual was among four scientists who compiled and edited papers for a theme issue of the June 27 2009 journal Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B titled “Food-web assembly and collapse: mathematical models and implications for conservation.”
“Better Than Tea Leaves”
The May 2009 HHMI Bulletin features Professor Mercedes Pascual and her mathematical models that consider climate change, disease agents and human immunity. (read)
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