Joey Bernhardt

Towards a mechanistic science of global change: from cells to ecosystems and human well-being

Wednesday, May 27

Biodiversity and ecosystems sustain human well-being. Global change is threatening the benefits that natural systems provide to people, fundamentally altering our ability to secure a sustainable and equitable future for humanity. The challenge for ecological science is clear: we need to understand ongoing environmental changes in mechanistic ways and at multiple scales that matter for ecosystems and people. In this talk, I will present recent work that addresses this challenge by linking physiological processes to higher order ecological processes governing the dynamics of populations and ecosystems, and the benefits to human well-being they provide. I will demonstrate how understanding living systems in terms of the core chemical and physical processes that sustain life (i.e. metabolism) has created inroads to predicting biological responses to environmental change at population and community levels. Using microbial systems (e.g. phytoplankton), I will present recent experiments exploring the mechanisms by which metabolic responses to temperature and resource limitation evolve, and their connections to human health in the context of thermal tolerance and anti-microbial tolerance. Finally, I will also present new work that bridges the gap between biodiversity science and human health in the context of seafood, by extending statistical and theoretical approaches from ecosystem science to human nutrition science.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Joey Bernhardt is an integrative ecologist whose research explores the drivers of biodiversity change and their implications for human well-being. Her research program addresses one of the most critical scientific challenges: how to predict future ecosystems in the context of global change. Her work advances a solution to this challenge by studying the processes that unite all of life on Earth - the metabolic processes by which living systems uptake, store and convert energy, matter, and information from their environments to grow and persist. She combines theory, lab and field experiments, data synthesis and community-engaged scholarship to study how living systems change as the environment changes, and what these changes mean for human well-being. 

A recipient of the Early Career Award (Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution) and an Early Career Fellow of the Ecological Society of America, Dr. Bernhardt’s work spans topics such as biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, ecological and evolutionary theory, and the responses of aquatic systems to warming and other global changes.

She is committed to working across disciplines and engaging with communities outside the university to advance research and solutions that benefit people and nature. She leads multi-disciplinary teams to exchange ideas across boundaries - intellectual boundaries, national boundaries, and disciplinary boundaries. She collaborates with Indigenous knowledge holders and practitioners to mobilize her research into the world. By developing partnerships with knowledge-users and co-designing research from the beginning, she aims to inform ecologically sustainable and socially just environmental decision-making.