In January 2021, I began what was essentially the hardest thing I've done academically: my PhD journey at ETH. Until then, my research had focused on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, and vegetation in the Arctic. But I decided to change trajectory a little. My focus has always been on biodiversity at various scales of space, time, and biological organisation, but this time, I would do this under the focus of food web ecology.
So for almost four years, I was lucky to work in the Ecosystems and Landscape Evolution group at ETH and WSL under Prof. Dr. Loïc Pellissier, learning how to build a metaweb, what environmental DNA was, conducting simulations in Python, and asking myself how to take information about network structure and dynamics, and reinterpret them as the architecture of biodiversity.
It was challenging, frustrating, and often fun, and now it's slowly coming to an end. On 27th November, 2024, I successfully defended my dissertation at ETH, which was accepted under the recommendation of Prof. Dr. Loïc Pellissier and Prof. Dr. Louis-Félix Bersier. Needless to say, I had been as nervous as nervous can be. Yet the defense did not feel like I was in a place of weakness, and trying to protect this baby that was my thesis. It felt much more freeing than that! At some point during the examination, I had this realisation that I was just discussing this thing that I love—biodiversity—with people who were curious and interested in my perspective, more that trying to poke holes in my work. While I never want to defend a PhD ever again, I still found the experience to be quite rewarding, rather than stressful, in the end! Now, off to get some rest and onto other challenges!
So for almost four years, I was lucky to work in the Ecosystems and Landscape Evolution group at ETH and WSL under Prof. Dr. Loïc Pellissier, learning how to build a metaweb, what environmental DNA was, conducting simulations in Python, and asking myself how to take information about network structure and dynamics, and reinterpret them as the architecture of biodiversity.
It was challenging, frustrating, and often fun, and now it's slowly coming to an end. On 27th November, 2024, I successfully defended my dissertation at ETH, which was accepted under the recommendation of Prof. Dr. Loïc Pellissier and Prof. Dr. Louis-Félix Bersier. Needless to say, I had been as nervous as nervous can be. Yet the defense did not feel like I was in a place of weakness, and trying to protect this baby that was my thesis. It felt much more freeing than that! At some point during the examination, I had this realisation that I was just discussing this thing that I love—biodiversity—with people who were curious and interested in my perspective, more that trying to poke holes in my work. While I never want to defend a PhD ever again, I still found the experience to be quite rewarding, rather than stressful, in the end! Now, off to get some rest and onto other challenges!