Simon Lax Email & Phone Number

I’m a community ecologist with broad interests in the assembly, diversity, and productivity of microbial ecosystems. My research uses theory and computational tools to predict how microbial communities will respond to environmental change, and tests those predictions experimentally in model microbial assemblages. My goal is to reduce the gap between empirical and theoretical ecology and ultimately to develop a deeper understanding of the microbial systems that underlie human and environmental health. In my current position as a postdoctoral fellow, I’ve focused on two main projects, both of which use bottom-up theoretical and experimental work to understand how ecological interactions are altered by changing environmental conditions. The first developed a simple extension of the Lotka-Volterra competition model that predicts that slower-growing species should be generically favored by increasing temperatures, which we demonstrated experimentally in two- and three-species cocultures. The second project focuses on the impact of ethanol on the interactions within a consortium of wine-fermenting yeasts and highlights the importance of considering ecological interactions the design of synthetic fermenting communities. In contrast to my current bottom-up work in simple communities, my graduate work at The University of Chicago leveraged high-throughput sequencing and bioinformatic approaches to characterize the spatiotemporal dynamics of microbial communities, with particular emphasis on how microorganisms colonize and are vectored through built environments.