Join us
Current opportunities for prospective students
Message for prospective students
I’m not recruiting new graduate students at the moment. The lab is currently at capacity for both Master’s and PhD supervision. This page will be updated whenever new positions become available.
Undergraduate students at UFMS interested in scientific initiation (PIBIC/PIVIC) or a monograph project are still welcome to get in touch — please send me an email (diogo.provete[at]ufms.br) with a brief note about yourself, your research interests, and your goals.
I’m always happy to talk to people about ecology, evolution, and science in general — even if there’s no formal position open.
When positions do open, I can supervise graduate students in the Ecology and Conservation graduate program and in Animal Biology at UFMS — check their websites for deadlines and admission details.
Recommended reading
- Marco Mello — convencendo o orientador (highly recommended, especially for undergraduates thinking about approaching a potential advisor — in Portuguese)
- Fifteen questions to ask before attending grad school
- What to bring to a meeting with your advisor
- Dicas para quem deseja ingressar na carreira acadêmica ainda na graduação
Available resources
Our lab has access to several facilities at INBIO (UFMS):
- Field station in the Pantanal — Base de Estudos do Pantanal
- Multi-user molecular biology and image labs — stereomicroscope, light microscope, and SEM
- Natural history collections — Zoology and Herbarium, with several hundred catalogued specimens
- LTER study site at the Bodoquena Plateau — PELD Bodoquena
- High-performance computing cluster at the School of Computer Science
Our core values
A research program in community ecology (Werner 1998) should rest on three pillars:
- Quantitative natural history (Futuyma 1998; Underwood et al. 2000)
- Field and/or laboratory experimentation (Underwood 1990; 1991)
- Modelling (Levins 1966)
Field observations reveal patterns (Levin 1978; 1992), but only experiments uncover the mechanisms producing them (Werner 1998). Model-building is essential because it lets us expand our view of the study system and turn ecology into a predictive science.
Other influential papers that shaped our thinking (chronological): Brown 1995, Lawton 1999, Hubbell 2001, Simberloff 2004, Roughgarden 2009, Scheiner & Willig 2008, and Vellend 2010.
We strive to make our science as open as possible. We always post preprints to public repositories — there are many advantages, especially for early-career researchers, including increased citations.