Understanding and adapting to climate change, understanding and more effectively treating cancers, and making science as a way of knowing available to all are important challenges for our immediate future. Through becoming better at putting ecology to work beyond the core discipline and typical audiences, ecologists can contribute to all of these. Three questions that motivate my work now are: How can we improve graduate education to enable future scientists and practitioners to meet the professional, ecological, and societal challenges of climate change? How can theory of ecological coexistence inform understanding of cancer biology and provide improved models for cancer therapy? How can we improve after-school education programs to enable early learners for life-long scientific thinking? We approach these through partnerships and collaborations with diverse scientists, mathematicians, and practitioners of science, education, and art.
Results/Conclusions
Our research on graduate education has shown that students value and benefit from interdisciplinary collaborations, multiple mentors -including from beyond academia, and opportunity to connect their science with value to people and society. Our research with cancer adds consideration of the dimension of temporal variation in the human body, the environment of cancer. This research informs understanding of multiple myeloma and breast cancer and motivates adaptive therapies based on the prospect of lengthening relatively benign coexistence of cancers and patients. Design-based research, in collaboration with experts in and practitioners of early childhood and informal education, fosters creation of engaging and effective ecology-based programs to empower young children, and their program facilitators, to think like scientists and exercise curiosity about nature.