Kyle Crocker, a postdoc in the Department of Ecology and Evolution, will be joining the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship program this fall. The program, launched in 2023, funds early-career researchers working at the intersection of AI and science and engineering at UChicago and its affiliated laboratories.
“My research focuses on how environmental factors – such as temperature, pH, and water content – shape microbial communities driving the global nutrient cycles that modulate climate change,” said Dr. Crocker. “Despite the apparent complexity of the processes responsible, I hope to use AI to help identify simple underlying principles that will provide insight into these important ecosystems.”
To test the idea that there might be large-scale patterns of microbial activity across many species, in other words, simple collective behavior, he and his collaborators plan to “subject intact soil samples to a suite of environmental perturbations and measure the response of both species abundances and community-level emission of carbon dioxide.” Then, using machine learning tools, they hope to identify “a simplified description of the community that connects response patterns across species to carbon dioxide emission.”
Dr. Crocker, whose fellowship begins this fall, is also affiliated with the Center for Physics of Evolving Systems. Trained as a physicist, he is currently advised by professor of Ecology and Evolution Seppe Kuehn. You can read more about his research here.