Two EEB faculty members are among twelve U-M scholars to receive National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards in the 2026 funding cycle.
Thais Vasconcelos, assistant professor in EEB, is leading a project titled, “Combining traits, phylogenies, and historical data to predict and quantify rates of plant geographic movements.” The work will combine phylogenetic models, herbarium records, and studies of invasive plants in the Great Lakes region, while also developing new teaching tools and public outreach through the U-M Museum of Natural History. “I’m super excited to understand whether there are general patterns in how plant lineages spread globally over macroevolutionary time,” said Dr. Vasconcelos. “There are ideas related to this that I’ve speculated about for years based on natural history observations and some more theoretical work, but we will now be able to test them quantitatively thanks to this grant.”
The CAREER program’s focus on science outreach appealed to Dr. Vasconcelos as an opportunity for professional development. “I’ve always felt that it was a bit out of my comfort zone,” she said. Partnering with the U-M Museum of Natural History, she developed a plan for communicating her research to the public. “It will push me and my team to think about the relevance of our work from a different perspective. This is especially important since we work with organisms that are not the most charismatic, but are hugely important ecologically.” The team will also develop software to be used in undergraduate and graduate courses to teach biogeography, and how species' spatial distributions are linked to their ecology, evolution, and conservation.
Luis Zaman, associate professor in EEB and Complex Systems, was successful in funding his project, “Understanding and Harnessing the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Evolution with Microbial and Computational Model Systems.” Dr. Zaman’s research will use both live bacteria and digital organisms to explore how complexity emerges through evolution. “On the base level, these projects really dive deeper into understanding why the push-and-pull between coevolving populations – whether computational or microbial – is a driving force for innovation,” said Dr. Zaman. “I think it pushes some of our work in this more theoretical direction, but also lets us try some weird stuff with building feedback in between computers and evolving microbes.”
Working in two disciplines has often inspired Dr. Zaman to come up with creative solutions to research problems. “It’s a way for me to force myself to find questions about life or evolution that don’t rely on the particular details of any given system,” he said. “If I find something in these weird digital organisms, then I want to still be able to say something about what we might expect in ‘real’ biology. But, that means we have to be really thoughtful with the kinds of questions we go after.”
Congratulations to Dr. Zaman and Dr. Vasconcelos on this outstanding achievement!
