Dr. Joey Bernhardt named an Early Career Fellow with the Ecological Society of America

Dr. Joey Bernhardt, assistant professor in Integrative Biology, has been named an Early Career Fellow with the Ecological Society of America.

The early career fellowship program recognizes members within eight years of completing their doctoral training who’ve made outstanding contributions to advancing or applying ecological knowledge in academics, government, nonprofit organizations, and the private sector. Early career fellows are elected for five years.

Bernhardt’s research explores how living systems across scales, from cells to ecosystems, respond and adapt to environmental change, and the impacts of biodiversity change on human well-being. Using theory, experiments and synthesis, her research focuses on the metabolic processes that organisms use to uptake, store and convert energy, matter and information from their environments. Among many other topics, her lab has studied how aquatic biodiversity impacts the nutritional value of seafood, how temperature-dependent metabolism shapes how populations respond to environmental changes, how species’ metabolic traits evolve, and how organisms anticipate change in their environments through cue-based mechanisms. 

Bernhardt is a research chair in the University of Guelph’s Centre for Ecosystem Management, where she works to develop the science needed to support ecosystem stewardship that supports people and nature. Bernhardt is also an advocate for open and reproducible science and is passionate about teaching students the tools of open science. Together with the Living Data Project, she developed a series of interactive, online tutorials about ecology and evolution, incorporating open science concepts and skills.

The new Ecological Society of America fellows will be formally recognized at a ceremony during the society’s annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland.

Read the full press release on the Ecological Society of America website.