[Colloquium] TODAY: Stefano Allesina (Evolution & Ecology), Crerar 390, Noon

[Rob Mitchum]

*Stefano Allesina*
*Professor of Ecology & Evolution*
*University of Chicago*

*What’s in a name? List of names reveal differences in academic systems*
*Friday, May 17, 2019 @ 12:00pm*
*John Crerar Library <https://goo.gl/maps/5h7saQhVerqW8gYA9>, Room 390*
*Lunch Provided*

Thanks to large, well-organized databases of dissertations, publications,
and citations, we can study the scientific endeavor using the same
quantitative tools that have advanced other areas of science. I present two
projects where I start from a list of names of academics and probe several
aspects of academic systems around the world. First, using lists of names
of all the professors in Italy, at the CNRS in France, and in R1 public
institutions in the US, I show how these data can reveal patterns of
mobility, gender imbalance and nepotism. Second, using lists of names of
PhD recipients in several countries and across 20 years, I show the
differential academic attrition by country, gender, discipline, and
prestige of the institution. These results have important policy
implications, with the goal of creating a more diverse and talented
scientific workforce.

*Bio:*

During the past decade, Stefano Allesina has developed methods to predict
the effects of extinctions in natural communities, investigated which
forces and principles are responsible for the shape of ecological networks,
and studied ways to partition networks into their principal components.

Allesina’s laboratory focuses on new mathematical and computational
techniques for ecological research. He has expanded his interests in
several directions, including a research program aimed at explaining how a
large number of “competitors” (e.g., trees in a forest) can coexist without
driving each other extinct.

Allesina recently received a four-year grant from the National Science
Foundation to model the way scientific discoveries are communicated and to
develop a framework to identify more efficient models for peer review,
potentially leading to changes associated with scientific publishing and
funding.

Allesina received both his PhD in ecology (2005) and his BS in
environmental sciences (2001) from the University of Parma, Italy. He
joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2010.
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