Please welcome Tinker Visiting Professor, Dr. David Alonso Gimenez, from the Center for Advance Studies of Blanes (CEAB-CSIC), Spain. In addition to collaborating with Dr. Mercedes Pascual, Dr. Gimenez will teach a class entitled, “Stochastic Processes in Continuous Time: Ecology and Epidemiology.”
Dr. Alonso's primary research interests lie in the interdisciplinary study of ecology and evolution on the basis of the integration of physics, mathematics, biology and computer simulation. In practice, he has been working essentially on two research topics: the evaluation of risks of spread and emergence of infectious diseases as a consequence of human-induced global environmental change and the study of the variety of mechanisms involved in the origins, maintenance and loss of species in ecological communities. Community ecology, population biology, infectious diseases, biodiversity research, climate change, environmental forcing, stochastic birth-death processes, non-linear interactions, self-organization, and complex systems are all common key-words on which his research agenda is focused.