Today I am visiting the Silwood Park Campus of Imperial College London, where I was invited to present the lab’s research on Ecological networks across scales from micro to macro in a research seminar as part of the Ecology and Evolution Seminar Series at Silwood Park.

I had great interesting discussions with Prof Samraat Pawar, my host over there at Silwood on the modelling of coalescent microbial communities. We discussed interesting ideas related to one of his recent papers on the role of competition and cooperation in these complex systems with her Masters student Jinyie. Synergies between our research were immediately apparent and we hope to collaborate in the future on these ideas!

I also had the chance to catch up with Tom Bell and Bonnie Waring, on topics related to the assembly of microbial communities in vivo and in vitro. They have very exciting research going on with amazing experimental setups.

Thanks Samraat for the great day at Silwood!