With its origins in natural history, agriculture, and forestry, and motivated by questions about the distribution and abundance of organisms, the mechanisms underlying evolutionary change, relationships between functional traits and the environment, and processes linking the biosphere with earth systems, physiological ecology is at the forefront of some of the most important issues of our time. This Organized Oral Session will mark the 50th year that Physiological Ecology Section members have communicated their findings at the Ecological Society of America's annual meeting. For this OOS, we have invited early- and mid-career scientists to share with us their cutting-edge work, and to help provide a view of the exciting challenges of our field as we look forward to the next 50 years. Notably, the theme for the 2020 ESA Annual Meeting – Harnessing the Data Revolution – marks one of many frontiers in physiological ecology, and provides the ideal topic for a forward-looking OOS. The ecological sciences are being transformed by massive, rapid, and diverse sources of information. Physiological ecologists have helped to create the ecological data revolution through their part in the development and application of remote sensing platforms, automated sensors, observatory networks, molecular techniques, large-scale and distributed experiments, and predictive models. We are now generating enormous amounts of data over time and across space that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Such big, rapid, and diverse datasets are opening up new avenues of research, inspiring fresh questions, and posing novel challenges. “Big Data” enable ecologists to address more complex questions and hypotheses than ever before that span multiple scales and disciplines. However, this information deluge also creates challenges in terms of methods available for harnessing the information contained in massive amounts of data, approaches for training our students to process and analyze mountains of information, and tools for effectively communicating the results to policy makers and the public that emerge from such complex analyses. The 105th annual meeting encourages contributions that address these issues or that employ novel and integrative approaches to harnessing the data revolution to address pressing issues in ecology. Given the broad overlap with the overall 2020 ESA meeting theme, we think that there will be widespread appeal among the general ESA membership for this OOS.