Prof. Brian Dennis is an Emeritus Professor at the Department of Fish and Wildlife Sciences and the Department of Mathematics and Statistical Science, University of Idaho. He earned his B.A. in Fine Arts from Roger Williams College in 1973, M.A. in Statistics in 1980 (major professor Dr. G.P. Patil), and Ph.D. in Ecology in 1982 from Pennsylvania State University (major professor Dr. F.M. Williams, who in turn had major professor Dr. G. Evelyn Hutchinson of Yale). He joined the University of Idaho as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Forest Resources in 1981. His research interests include Statistical Ecology, Biometrics, Mathematical Modeling, Theoretical Ecology, Conservation Biology, and Population Dynamics. His scientific publications are wide ranging among topics such as nonlinear dynamics and chaos in populations, negative density dependence, Allee effects, population viability analysis, insect phenology, stochastic population modeling, and improvement of statistical practices in the life sciences.
Dr. José M. Ponciano is a Professor at the Department of Biology, University of Florida. He earned his BS and Licenciatura in Biology from the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala in 1998 and an MS in Ecology from Universidad Austral de Chile in 2001. He then went on to obtain an MS in Statistics at the University of Idaho (2004). Two years later, he also completed his PhD in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the Mathematics Department of the University of Idaho. His research focuses on the use of stochastic processes in Biology. He views stochastic processes and statistics as the ideal language to translate fundamental questions in Biology into testable hypotheses that can be confronted with real data. This research focus grew from the application of stochastic processes in Ecology, Population Genetics, and Evolution to Wildlife Management, Conservation Biology, and Fisheries to Epidemiological Modeling, Microbial Community Ecology, Population Genetics, and Phylogenetics.
