ALT Ijeoma Nwafor, undergrad research assistant, poses in a long white lab coat.

ALT Headshot of Amanda Cicchino on a navy background with text "Amanda is an integrative ecologist focused on understanding how organisms respond to environmental change. She uses thermal physiological, genomic, and computational approaches in her investigations of species vulnerability to gradual and rapid environmental changes."

ALT Headshot of Kayla Hale on a navy background with text “Kayla studies the structure and dynamics of complex networks of species interactions. Her research focuses on how different types of interactions – with consumers, resources, and mutualists – interface to affect ecological systems across scales, from organisms’ behavior to emergent ecosystem services like agricultural yield.”

ALT Text "paper spotlight: Stable diverse food webs become more common when interactions are more biologically constrained." with the citation of the paper on a blue background with fish icons

ALT Figure from paper with caption: "Using recent computationally efficient methodological advances from metabolic networks, we employ for the first time an inverse approach to diversity–stability research. We compare classical random interaction matrices of realistic food web topology (hereafter the classical model) to feasible, biologically constrained, webs produced using the inverse approach. We show that an energetically constrained feasible model yields a far higher proportion of stable high-diversity webs than the classical random matrix approach."