Congratulations to Professor Michael Bonsall who will take up the role of MPLS Associate Head of Division for Education for Hilary term and Trinity term 2018.
His research focuses on applications of mathematics to problems in the life sciences (and beyond), with an interest in population biology (population dynamics, community ecology, evolutionary ecology).
Research in his group focuses on a wide range of questions such as the population and evolutionary dynamics of life history strategies (e.g. the evolution of longevity), the role of spatial structure on shared enemy and competing enemy interactions, the effects of enrichment on the diversity of ecological communities, the interplay between noise and dynamics in multispecies interactions and the evolution of resistance to microbes. Many of these projects involve the development of theoretical models in conjunction with experiments or observations in the field or laboratory.
The group aims to test different ecological and evolutionary ecology theories by fitting relevant mathematical models to appropriate ecological experimental (or observational) data.
