Join us
Current opportunities for prospective students
Funded project — urban eco-evolutionary dynamics
We received three years of funding (BRL 99,000) from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) to work on eco-evolutionary dynamics in urban ecosystems in Brazil. One PhD and one Master’s student are already testing the effects of landscape context and local variables on phenotypic traits (morphometric and bioacoustic) of frogs along an urbanisation gradient.
The project has four co-PIs from different institutions: Andros T. Gianuca (UFRN), Fernando R. da Silva (UFSCar), Michel V. Garey (UNILA), Franco L. Souza (UFMS), and Fabio Angeoletto (UFR).
We need more people to reach our goals — if you’d like to join the team as a Master’s or PhD student, please get in touch with Diogo or any other member of the team.
Message for prospective students
I’m currently recruiting graduate students. If you’ve browsed the lab page, liked what you found, and would like to join the lab as an undergrad, Master’s, or PhD student, please send me an email (diogo.provete[at]ufms.br) telling me about yourself, your research interests, your experience, and your goals.
I can supervise graduate students in the Ecology and Conservation graduate program and in Animal Biology at UFMS — check their website for deadlines and admission details.
I’m always interested in meeting and talking to people about ecology, evolution, and science in general.
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.