Caroline Farrior

Palo Duro Canyon, Texas

I am a 2nd year graduate student in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University with Simon Levin and Steve Pacala. I am interested in the mechanisms of plant communities and the development of their species compositions. I am working with an analytical model of forest dynamics to make testable predictions of some of the hypotheses I am interested in.

Questions:

1. What are your main interests? Feel free to include a "pie in the sky" big idea!

I am interested in understanding the way that plant communities work and what processes lead to their structure and species compositions.

2. What sorts of expertise can you bring to the group?

I am a plant ecologist. I have have worked with theories of species coexistence and have been working with adaptive dynamics models for plant strategies lately.

3. What do you hope to get out of the CSSS?

I hope to broaden my tool set for untangling the mechanisms that drive complex system behavior. I hope to broaden my perspective on such problems by understanding how researchers from other fields approach at these types of problems.

4. Do you have any possible projects in mind for the CSSS? (Recall that you will all be working in groups on at least one project with the goal of presenting your progress on the last day and finishing up a paper by sumer's end.)

I have been working intensely on my thesis proposal in the past couple of months, just finishing with my general exam a few weeks ago. I am very open to new kinds of ideas and new systems for the project this summer.