Ryan Chisholm
Associate Professor (Office: S3-01-11)

Ryan is a theoretical ecologist with an interest in tropical forest ecology and biodiversity. Current major research projects aim to understand the mechanisms responsible for large-scale patterns of tree diversity in tropical forests and to estimate extinction rates in the tropics. Download Ryan’s CV here.

Tak Fung
Senior Research Fellow

Tak constructs and uses mathematical models to investigate processes governing population dynamics in complex ecosystems. He studied Mathematics at Imperial College London as an undergraduate, before doing two PhDs at University College London and Queen’s University Belfast, on modelling the dynamics of coral reef and temperate marine shelf ecosystems. Tak is working on a range of projects including models of tropical forest dynamics and epidemiological models of dengue in Singapore. More details on Tak can be found at his personal website.

Nadiah Kristensen
Research Fellow

Nadiah is a theoretical ecologist with broad interests in dynamical systems. She is currently working on applications of evolutionary game theory to conservation problems. More details on Nadiah can be found at her personal website.

Nicolás Firbas
PhD Student

Nicolás did his undergraduate degree at Rutgers State University of New Jersey in statistics with a minor in entomology. Afterwards he obtained an MA in mathematics from a joint program between the Universitat de València and Universitat Politècnica de València with a thesis on machine learning methods for description of anomalous diffusion. Nicolás is broadly interested in mathematical modelling of ecological systems.

Sean Pang
PhD Student

Sean is completing the final year of his PhD, and was until recently a student in the lab of Ted Webb, who has now moved to the University of Helsinki. Sean’s interests revolve around spatial ecology and he is currently focussed on species distribution modelling and related methodological questions, such as the effect of various methods of variable selection on temporal transferability of the models, and the effects of different land-use change maps on model performance and prediction. His ecological interests include the effect of climate change on the distribution patterns of trees in the tropics. He is also interested in the eventual conservation planning recommendations that may come from these models.

Angelica See
PhD Student

Angelica is interested in studying the effects of habitat fragmentation on tropical ecosystems. She graduated with an environmental science degree specialising in ecology from Nanyang Technological University.

Kong Fanhua
Visiting PhD Student

Fanhua is a visiting PhD student in plant ecology from East China Normal University. She completed her undergraduate degree in Marine Ecology at the Ocean University of China. Her current work focuses on the role of the competition–colonization trade-off in species coexistence using empirical and theoretical approaches. She also has broad interests in the ecological mechanisms driving the diversity, dynamics, and distributions of plant species.

Zhu Mingyi
Master’s Student

Mingyi is an MSc student with undergraduate background from Wuhan University. He majored in Biological Science, but is very interested in tackling biological problems with mathematical modelling approaches. He is currently doing his Master’s project on the possibility of developing a sustainable wild bird harvesting model.

Nicholas Fong
Honours student

Nicholas Fong is a fourth-year undergraduate student currently doing his Honours project on species–area relationships for mangroves using a dataset on global mangrove distribution.

Jonah Goh
Honours student

Jonah Goh is a fourth-year undergraduate student majoring in Mathematics and doing a project in our lab in which he is using epidemiological models to assess the affect of temporary lockdowns on long-term disease burden.

Ng Jing Ting
UROPS student

Ng Jing Ting is a third-year undergraduate student majoring in Computational Biology and is currently doing her Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme in Science (UROPS) project on using a Gibbs sampler to fit a high-dimensional model to ensembles of species’ detection histories to estimate extinction rates.