Dr. Stephan B. Munch 
I am a Fisheries Ecologist with NOAA Fisheries and an Adjunct Professor at UC Santa Cruz in the departments of Applied Math and Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior. My research is on the dynamics of multispecies systems and the feedbacks between species interactions and life-history evolution. I like to mix experiments with model species, meta-analyses to integrate coarse-grained information across taxa, statistical method development, and theory. My group has been involved in a wide variety of projects including quantitative genetics of growth and maturation in fishes, transgenerational thermal plasticity, parasite community ecology, predicting storm surge in coastal environments, identifying factors facilitating cooperation in capuchin monkeys, the effects of climate change on mosquito-borne diseases, and designing reserve networks for the conservation of tropical birds.
Currently, I am (mostly) focused on building robust tools for ecosystem management. I am particularly interested in tools that don’t rely on having a complete and detailed description of the system; there are far more things left out of ecosystem models than can be included and we need to develop approaches that work around this limitation.
Bethany Johnson
Bethany is interested in developing and applying quantitative methods to forecast and manage populations in ecological systems. Her current work extends existing non-parametric methods to make them suitable for forecasting in spatially extended systems and applies these methods to short-lived marine species.
Dr. Tanya Rogers
Ph.D. Northeastern University (Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology)
B.S. University of Puget Sound (Biology)
Tanya is interested in community interactions and population dynamics across space and time, and in combining empirical and quantitative approaches to yield results that are both ecologically insightful and applicable to conservation and management. She has worked mainly in marine and coastal systems, and employs both field/experimental methods and modeling approaches.
Dr. Cheng-Han Tsai
Ph.D. James Cook University (Coral Reef Ecology)
B.S. National Taiwan University (Oceanography)
I am from Taiwan. I finished MS studying woody plant communities in rainforests of Taiwan and was a research assistant studying plankton ecology and nonlinear ecological dynamics at Institute of Oceanography National Taiwan University supervised by Zac Chih-hao Hsieh. I then moved to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and pursued PhD studying coral reef ecology and reef fish community dynamics at James Cook University supervised by Sean Connolly. The major theme of my persuasion in different academic areas is seeking a quantitative approach to understand the complex nature of ecological interactions and dynamics. In Steve’s lab, I am keen to extend the applications of empirical dynamic modelling to different areas. My current projects focus on forecasting complex nonlinear dynamics of exploited marine species and developing empirical dynamics-based indicators and steady-state policies for fisheries management.
Dr. Uttam Bhat
In the past he conceptualized and studied simple models of random foraging in patchy resource landscapes to uncover the tradeoffs between body size, resource clustering, foraging and life-history strategies. He also designed mathematical tools to study the macroscopic properties of various network growth mechanisms.
Dr. Tara Dolan
Former Lab Members
Graduate Students
Charles Perretti (MS, 2010), Kestrel Perez (PhD, 2010), Masatoshi Sugeno (PhD, 2012), Jorge Velasquez (PhD, 2012), Jin Gao (PhD, 2012), Santiago Salinas (PhD, 2012), JoAnne Siskidis (MS, 2017), Mathew Heiner (PhD 2019),
Postdocs
Antoine Brias, Juan Arriaza-Lopez, Who-Seung Lee, Valerie Poynor, Carl Boettiger, Santiago Salinas, Adrian Jordaan
Undergraduate Researchers
Dylan Esguerra, Kenneth Gee, Sophia Samus, Adriana Maciel-Metal, Aditi Maheshwari, Keerthi Krishnan, Anais Muro, Julia Einsweilier, Mason Emery, Dylan Meeks, Anisa Rizo, John La Bonte, Daniel Chicchon, Lindsay Cullen, Steven Johnson, Max Monson, Hanna Knotter, Emily Parker, Kendall Pawlowski, Youngrog Lee, Katherine Schmidt, Allison Webster, Darien Rivera, Ariel Boyer, Kailey Gullickson, Brittany Portulano, Rebecca White, Wayne Brown, Madeline Whitman, Eliseo Nevarez, Caelan Noyes, Torrey Gorra, Cristina Spina, Ellie Miller, Haley Murray, Ariel Hunter, Michelle Gorbaty, Justin Grimm-Greenblatt, Leeann Latta, Winston Martinez, Olumide Babalola, Marie Whyte, Landau Buissireth, Gaurav Mandal, Helen Cheng, Maria Madsen, Susan Sackman, Kristin Onsgaard, Shanon Montanino, Amanda Roy, Benson Liang, Long Ng, Brenden Van Slyke, Stacey Assael, Alison Yee, Richard Parker (REU), Quentin Agren (REU), Sebastian Halpern (REU), Ben Sherman (REU), Jasmine Rajbandhary (REU), Christopher Ketch (REU), Emily Matkiewicz (REU), Shaina Villalobos (REU), Julia Portman (REU), Kristen Sheldon (REU), Raphaela Goncalves Bueno (REU)