Visiting Associates

Sven Bacher is a professor at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and is visiting the C·I·B for one month in January/February 2016. Sven has worked on biological invasions for more than 15 years and is particularly interested in conceptual issues and syntheses that improve the field.

Brett M. Bennett is a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Western Sydney University. He is also a Senior Research Associate of the University of Johannesburg and a former Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow. His research uses historical methods to investigate how the interaction of human actions and natural processes create contemporary ecosystems, scientific ideas, and conservation policies.

Bethany Bradley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Conservation at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (USA). Her research focuses on the biogeography and spatial ecology of invasive plants.

Paul Downey, an Associate Professor at the University of Canberra in Australia, is a visiting C·I·B fellow for three months from April through July 2015. Paul has worked on invasions for almost 20 years, and has spent time working in both academia and management. He was the Program Leader (Weeds) with NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service for 9 years, and has been at the University of Canberra for the past 5 years. Paul has worked on a wide range of areas on invasions.

Ben Evans is an Associate Professor in the Biology Department at McMaster University (Canada). His research interests center on evolutionary genomics, with focuses on sex chromosome evolution, population genomics, and gene duplication in vertebrates such as macaque monkeys, vizcacha rats, and African clawed frogs.

Brendon Larson, a professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada, was a fellow in the CIB for three months from March through May 2014. Brendon has a background in ecology, but now conducts interdisciplinary social scientific research about invasive species, for example related to how to communicate about them and how different stakeholders evaluate them. He has also written philosophical papers about our conceptualization of invasive species, specifically in the context of the dramatic changes occurring to socio-ecological systems in the Anthropocene.

Philipp Lehmann is a researcher and lecturer at the department of Zoology, Stockholm University, Sweden. His main research topics include hypometabolism, energetics, cold tolerance, microclimate modelling and biological timing mechanisms.

Mike McCoy is an Assistant Professor in the Biology Department at East Carolina University (USA). His research engages both conceptual and empirical approaches to address questions in conservation, population, and community ecology.

Anna is an expert on island ecology, and is especially interested in the ways that different drivers of global change, including biological invasions, influence the interactions between plants and animals. Her current projects involve predicting how invasive species integrate into, and impact on, the mutualistic networks of different archipelagos – including the Galápagos, the Canary Islands, and the Balearic Islands.

Joana Vicente, based at the Research Centre in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources (CIBIO) at the University of Évora (Portugal), was a Fellow at the C·I·B during October and November 2014. Joana has a background in fundamental and applied research on ecological modelling of biogeographic patterns, landscape ecology, environmental change, and invasive alien species. Her current projects involve predicting the impacts of multi-scale environmental change on the biological invasions using both static and dynamic modelling techniques.

Jean R.S. Vitule, is Associate Professor of Ecology and Applied Ecology in the Federal University of Parana (UFPR). His interests are in Invasion Biology and Biotic Homogenization processes and patterns, with a special focus on aquatic biodiversity and fishes. He is interested in the ecology and management of invasive species and uses aquatic organisms, and especially fishes to test ecological concepts on biological invasions and biodiversity.

James Vonesh is an Associate Professor in the Biology Department at Virginia Commonwealth University. James' research is focused on predator-prey ecology, size- and stage-structured processes in populations and communities, and how organisms with complex life cycles link aquatic and terrestrial food webs.

Dr Arne Witt is the Regional (African and Asia) Coordinator for Invasive Species for CABI, based in Nairobi, Kenya. Actively involved in a number of regional UNEP-GEF projects in Africa, the Caribbean and Asia and other IAS projects throughout the developing world, Arne seeks to strengthen the policy/legislation framework with regard to invasive species.