Mitchell: Now I'm here with Jennifer Dunne, who is Professor here at the Santa Fe Institute.
And she's an ecologist who's well known for her work on food webs.
Jen is also now Chair of the Faculty here at the Institute.
So, Jen. Let me start out by asking you, what is this job, Chair of the Faculty?
And what is the Faculty?
Dunne: Right, so the faculty for said SFI; we have about 12 resident faculty.
And about half of those are actually full-time at the Institute.
And that includes me and several other people with diverse interests and backgrounds and areas of expertise.
We have another about six resident faculty who are part-time who come here
for several months out of the year from their home institution.
But we also have about a hundred external faculty; they're primarily affiliated somewhere else.
But they come and visit SFI and engage in the academic life here and the intellectual life here
and often collaborate with people here and with each other.
We also have about a dozen or more postdocs that are here full-time and, again, from a very wide range of disciplines.
And both, there's some that are Omidyar fellows and some that are associated with particular grants.
And so we have a lot of different kinds of researchers that are officially affiliated with SFI
in addition to all the visitors that we have.
And so the Chair's duties, basically, are to oversee the scientific life and activities at SFI.
So I do things like manage working group requests, which are small groups of people getting together,
usually 6 to 10 people, to work on a very particular project of some kind.
We also have workshops that are much larger, where we bring in a diversity of people to usually give more formal talks.
Those often lead to edited volumes or various other outcomes.
And so, basically, the Chair just sort of oversees all those different aspects
of the scientific and intellectual life of SFI.
Mitchell: And Jen, what are different ways that people can get involved in the Institute?
Dunne: There's a number of ways that people can get involved.
And a really excellent new one is the MOOC that you're doing right now.
And I imagine we'll be doing more of these in the future.
We also have Complex Systems Summer Schools that are open to graduate students and postdocs
and sometimes also people at other levels.
They're basically several-week courses in the summertime. We have them here in Santa Fe.
They also happen in other places in the world, like China and South America.
Melanie does a number of short courses; maybe you can say a little.
Mitchell: Yeah, so we do short courses for professional development
that are all advertised on the Education section of the SFI web page.
Dunne: And going to the SFI webpage is really a great place to go also.
We have a lot of resources and information there; you can access our working paper series there.
And also get a sense of who all the different scientists and researchers are
and what they're up to.
And it's very diverse as you'll see when you go there.
Mitchell: Yeah, for sure. So maybe you could just say a few words about your own research.
What kinds of problems are you working on these days?
Dunne: Right. So I study ecological networks. So I'm an ecologist by training.
But really I use a lot of methods from network theory, to think very broadly about ecology.
And I also try to push ecology in much more broad ways than sort of the traditional,
conventional way that people think about ecology.
So I look at network structure and dynamics, at how species interact with each other.
And including: in some cases, I work with archaeologists and anthropologists
to think about how humans fit into ecological networks and how their roles compare to other species.
Also, I work with parasitologists to understand sort of how parasites fit into ecosystems,
because those things are often studied very separately from each other.
I collaborate with paleobiologists to think about very deep-time ecological networks.
And we also use this ecological network framework to think very broadly,
but in a very quantitative and rigorous way, about the robustness
and sustainability and persistence of complex systems like these.
So it's just a very useful framework for a lot of different questions.
Mitchell: Can you give an example of one of the kinds of network tools that you use,
since we've been learning about that in the course?
Dunne: Right. Yeah, we've actually done some software development just for ourselves
but that we also share with the broader community;
where we've developed visualization tools that are specific to ecological networks -
but that people have also used for other kinds of networks -
that produce very beautiful and useful visualizations,
3-D visualizations that you can spin around and you can animate with dynamics.
These biomasses don't just go to equilibrium.
They actually do tend to cycle in very interesting ways that we can characterize.
For this particular network, eventually two of the species do actually go extinct.
But the other 18 taxa basically cycle; their populations cycle indefinitely.
And if you look at the biomass mins and maxs for any individual species,
you often see that a lot of these are showing persistent chaotic dynamics.
And so that's why networks are a really powerful tool for understanding ecosystem dynamics,
because they do give us that framework for understanding how effects ripple throughout the whole system.
Mitchell: Well, it's been great talking to you. Thanks a lot.
Dunne: Yeah, it's been great talking to you. Thanks.