I am excited to recruit a Ph.D. student to start in the fall of 2025 to join our Global Change and Conservation Lab at the Missouri Botanical Garden.  Working with lab members, other mentors, and me, the successful applicant will design her/his/their own research project focused on developing ecological models at biogeographic scales and/or temporal scales relevant to conservation and global change (decades, centuries, millennia). Possible areas of focus include examining how extreme weather affects species' distributions and abundances, joining models with phenological or morphological data collected from the Missouri Botanical Garden’s herbarium (one of the largest in the world), or designing methods to evaluate the conservation status of rare species for which we only have "messy" data. We do not have a geographic area of focus other than Earth, but nearly all of our work has a strong modeling component.

The student will join the Global Change and Conservation Lab and ~70 Ph.D.-level researchers, plus other Ph.D. students, and postdocs at the Garden.  The student will be enrolled in and receive their degree from the Ecology and Evolutionary graduate program at nearby Washington University in Saint Louis where I have a joint adjunct appointment, and so will also be part of that vibrant academic community. Support for 4 years is available through Garden and University fellowships and one semester of required teaching assistantship.

Applications for Ph.D. positions are due December 1st of 2024. 

Relevant websites:

1. Global Change and Conservation Lab website: https://earthskysea.org and especially my mentoring statement https://earthskysea.org/mentoring
2. Graduate Program in Ecology, Evolution, and Population Biology at Washington University in Saint Louis: https://dbbs.wustl.edu/programs/ecology-evolutionary-biology
3. Research at the Missouri Botanical Garden: https://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/plant-science/plant-science/research and https://discoverandshare.org/category/science-and-research

If you have questions, please contact me at adam.smith@mobot.org.