The 15th annual Early Career Scientists Symposium will be on Saturday, March 16, 2019 in a location to be confirmed. The theme is Stable Isotopes in Ecology, Evolution and Conservation.

Stable isotopes of common and trace elements have a wide range of applications in modern and ancient ecosystems. The ratios of rare to common isotopes are used to gain insights about nutrient cycling in marine, freshwater, and terrestrial ecosystems, dietary ecology of modern and fossil animals, vegetation and climates of the past, life histories of long-lived organisms, evolution of photosynthetic pathways, and movement ecology.  The ECSS committee includes faculty, postdocs and graduate students from EEB, the Museum of Paleontology, and the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences to highlight some common interests.

The symposium will feature both established and novel uses of stable isotopes across a wide range of organisms, ecosystems and time periods. Our goal is to create a program with contributions from evolutionary biologists (e.g., evolution of photosynthetic pathways with different isotopic signatures), plant and animal physiologists (e.g., isotopic records of life history), paleobiologists (e.g., prey preferences of ancient predators), ecosystem ecologists (e.g., biogeochemical cycles and food webs) and conservation biologists (e.g., determining the geographic source of elephant ivory). The program will include one to two keynote talks by senior speakers and seven to eight talks by early-career speakers.

The call for nominations is now open. Early-career speakers include graduate students, postdocs and recently appointed assistant professors (curators). Senior speakers are those who have multiple years as faculty, curators or other relevant professional positions. Please send the name, contact information, and a brief explanation of relevance of your recommended speaker to ecss-2019@umich.edu by Wednesday, November 21. Thank you!

The ECSS 2019 committee includes: Jake Allgeier, EEB; Georgia Auteri, EEB; Catherine Badgley, EEB and the Museum of Paleontology; Dan Fisher, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Paleo, and EEB; Katie Loughney, EEB and Paleo; Knute Nadelhoffer, EEB and U-M Biological Station; Ben Passey, EARTH; Bian Wang, EARTH and Paleo.

Visit the Early Career Scientists Symposium website