Edwin Pos nominated for New Scientist science talent award 2021

Edwin Pos is one of the three nominees for the election of the greatest scientific talent of the Netherlands and Flanders by the magazine New Scientist. Pos is an associate professor at the Department of Ecology and Biodiversity and scientific director of the Botanical Gardens of Utrecht University.

“One moment he is almost like Indiana Jones, collecting data on rare species during adventurous expeditions deep into the Amazon rainforest,” says New Scientist. “The next, he is cracking complex mathematical approaches from statistical mechanics, chaos theory and information entropy to interpret the data he has collected. Pos breaks with classical approaches in ecology and tries to use new methods to gain a better understanding of the dynamics of biodiversity.”

Challenges

Pos is happy with the nomination. After all, he's happy with all attention for his research field. “After more than 150 years of ecological research, we still face challenges in understanding how ecosystems function, let alone how to predict future changes in light of climate change.” According to Pos, part of these challenges stem from the scale at which we need to understand these dynamics, but also from the sheer complexity of these systems.