Olá! My name is Lucas P. Medeiros and I am a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Fisheries Collaborative Program at UC Santa Cruz and NOAA Fisheries working with Stephan Munch and Eric Palkovacs. Prior to this position, I obtained a PhD degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from MIT under the supervision of Serguei Saavedra. I am originally from Brazil, where I obtained a Master’s degree in Ecology from the University of São Paulo (USP) under the supervision of Paulo R. Guimarães Jr. as well as Bachelor’s degrees in Biology and in Applied Mathematics also from USP. For more information, please see my CV.

My research revolves around understanding and predicting how ecological communities and their constituent species respond to natural and human-driven perturbations. To do so, I develop approaches based on population dynamics, dynamical systems theory, and empirical dynamic modeling to unravel how communities may respond to disturbances such as warming, storms, fires, pollution, or overfishing. I am particularly interested in theoretical approaches that allow us to anticipate how a community might respond to future disturbances by learning about its dynamical behavior from past empirical data. My hope is that this research can be applied to better conserve and manage ecological communities in the face of stronger and more frequent human-driven perturbations. In addition to this main line of research, I am also interested in several related topics that include: data-driven approaches to forecast and manage natural populations, structural stability approaches to understand changes in community composition, and coevolutionary dynamics in networks of interacting species. Check out the Research and Publications tabs or get in touch if you would like to know more about my research!