Systems Matter Seminar | How Microelectronics Could Revolutionize Ecology and Evolution

In this seminar, I will introduce my lab's research program at Georgia Tech, which investigates the ecological and evolutionary processes driving biological diversity across space and time. To do this, I study lizards, an exceptionally diverse and fascinating group of organisms perfect for a wide range of biological research. I will argue that we have reached a frontier in our ability to infer process from pattern in ecology and evolution, lacking answers to profound questions in biology: how do individual animals interact with their local environment and each other? How frequently are different behaviors exhibited? How do most animals die? How does evolution by natural selection actually operate? These questions highlight a 'dirty secret' in biology: we don't really know what animals do when we are not directly observing them. To address this, we desperately need better integration of electrical sensors into biological research. While wearable sensors are now being deployed in some biological contexts, most are unsuitably large or heavy for the types of organisms most frequently used in biological research, such as the small lizards that I study. By developing lightweight, miniaturized sensors suitable for small organisms, I am confident that electrical engineers could revolutionize the study of ecology and evolution. This interdisciplinary approach has the potential to unlock new insights into the intricate processes thatshape the natural world, as well as open up new avenues for understanding how species adapt and evolve in changing environments.

 

Dr. James T. Stroud is an Assistant Professor in the School of Biological Sciences atGeorgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on the ecology and evolution of lizards, particularly how species interactions and environmental changes drive evolution in the wild. Dr. Stroud received his Ph.D. from Florida International University in 2018 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis before joining Georgia Tech in Fall 2023. Dr. Stroud's work utilizes a combination of field studies, experiments, and comparative analyses to investigate ecological and evolutionary processes across scales, from populations to communities, and from individual species to entire groups. His research has been published in top scientific journals including Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Trends in Ecology and Evolution. He is an Elected Fellow of the Linnean Society, an Early Career Fellow of the Ecological Society of America, the 2024awardee of the Founder's Prize by the British Ecological Society.