A Profile of Priyanga Amarasekare

Abstract

Priyanga Amarasekare's pathbreaking research career as an ecologist was eloquently outlined in her outstanding MacArthur lecture, “Non-linearity, variability and emergent patterns: an integrative Perspective” presented at the 2023 Ecological Society Meeting in Portland, Oregon. Her initial work on coexistence of competitors in metacommunities showed how competition-dispersal trade-offs generalize beyond plants and was used to provide vital insights into biological control of insect pests in Southern California. She has since extended the classical framework of species interactions to highlight multiple conflicting eco-evo drivers of coexistence and exclusion. In her MacArthur lecture, she outlined a new synthetic theory of how rate-controlled traits and thermal reaction norms are likely to determine persistence, coexistence, and range expansion/contraction under ongoing climate change (available from ESA at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOO-vzAZHsk).

Priyanga began her dual research programs on theory and experiments as a Ph.D. student with Dr. Steve Frank at UC Irvine after a Master's at the University of Hawaii. She developed a new spatial theory for species interactions as a member of the first outstanding crop of NCEAS postdocs, a group that produced many of the leading ecologists of her generation. Her 2-year postdoc at NCEAS was highly productive, but all too brief, as word got out and soon Yale, the University of Washington, and the University of Chicago were competing for her. She quickly found herself as an Assistant Professor in UChicago's prestigious Department of Ecology and Evolution.

In 2001, as a freshly minted assistant professor at UChicago, Dr. Amarasekare won the Young Investigator Prize from the American Society of Naturalists. She continued to work on the mathematics of dispersal and coexistence in metacommunities, and the stimulating intellectual environment at UChicago encouraged her to think about the evolutionary underpinnings of population persistence and species coexistence. In 2005, while still an assistant professor, she was elected President of ESA's Theoretical Ecology section. In time though she began to miss the sun and warmth of Southern California where she has done her fieldwork for many years, this led her to take a position at UCLA where she hoped to find a set of collaborative and interactive colleagues. There, for nearly two decades, she conducted fieldwork on insect host-parasitoid communities, while developing a new cutting-edge theory on temperature effects on population dynamics and species interactions. This work has garnered her numerous accolades including a Complex Systems Scholar Award from the James S. McDonnell Foundation, and the prestigious Guggenheim fellowship. In 2017, Dr. Amarasekare was elected a fellow of the Ecological Society of America (ESA). In 2022, she won the Robert H. MacArthur award from ESA, the highest honor a mid-career ecologist can receive. She is only the fifth woman and the second woman of color to receive the MacArthur award.

The change in academic climate from Chicago to UCLA was a mixed blessing. Certainly, her research continued to grow from strength to strength: research on the role of climate change in driving species interactions was rewarded by several million dollars of extramural grants from the National Science Foundation, McDonnell Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. This allowed her to develop new models of intermediate complexity and to parameterize these with a variety of disparate data sets in ways that provided vital new insights into the ways in which climate change is likely to modify both natural and agricultural food webs. Priyanga cogently illustrates how warming in communities with strong seasonality may cause them to develop into ones with bi-seasonality: outbreaks will start earlier in the spring, followed by secondary outbreaks in the fall, separated by a decline in intensity over the summer when temperatures are so hot that they suppress the ecological processes that drive species interactions. Her theoretical framework is also the first to explain why tropical ectotherms become invasive aliens in temperate climates, while temperate ectotherms have difficulty establishing in tropical climates. Throughout her career, she has been an outstanding mentor and has inspired generations of young scientists, particularly those from under-represented groups.

Over the last 2 yr, Priyanga has produced a significant canon of work on climate change and its impact on biodiversity while fighting an increasingly desperate battle against discrimination on multiple fronts. Many of her colleagues in the scientific community are appalled and astounded at how badly she has been treated by UCLA. As we enter the decade where the future health of the planet, as well as large parts of California's agricultural economy, will require large numbers of young people trained in understanding the interaction between climate and nature, brilliant minds like Priyanga need to be nurtured and rewarded by the State's education system.

Over the last year, Priyanga and her two teenage children have existed with neither salary nor medical benefits after she was suspended in a closed-door hearing by the University's Privilege and Tenure Committee. A “Go-Fund-me” initiative was set up by Professor Sally Otto (University of British Columbia, Vancouver), which was widely and generously supported across the ecological and evolutionary biology community (https://www.gofundme.com/f/dr-priyanga-amarasekare). It helped her two children to survive up to her MacArthur lecture this August. During her 1-year suspension, which started in July 2022, Priyanga was denied access to her laboratory and forbidden to mentor her graduate students, whom the University placed with alternative advisors with no expertise in their research area. She continues to be barred from campus even after her suspension ended on June 30, 2023. The University has withheld her NSF funding after concealing the fact of her suspension from the agency and is continuing to do so beyond the period of her suspension. Her groundbreaking experimental work on climate change, funded by NSF for decades, has been destroyed, wasting the tax-paying public's investment in that research, which the University had a responsibility to safeguard. Priyanga was forbidden to talk to her colleagues or students during the suspension and has been prevented from recruiting students or postdocs to her lab, even after she served the suspension. The latter is especially a tragedy for smart young graduates who've been battling with research under Covid, after competing for a place with a much sought-after mentor at UCLA. Their treatment by UCLA's administration may prove a major deterrent for others considering graduate school or junior faculty appointments.

The university has maintained almost total silence on the reasons for Priyanga's suspension, simply stating that she violated the faculty code of conduct. However, many in the scientific community, as evidenced by the press coverage by Nature and the Chronicle of Higher Education, strongly believe that she is being persecuted for speaking out against repeated discrimination in her department. Departmental colleagues at UCLA who are supportive of Dr. Amarasekare are threatened with similar censure by the highly litigious administration if they speak publicly about the issue. But if her biggest charge is bringing the name of the University into disrepute, no one is doing a better job of this than the senior members of the Universities administration.

Dr. Priyanga Amarasekare is one of the brightest minds in current theoretical ecology as her MacArthur lecture illustrates. We wish her the very best and hope that she will find a new academic home that supports and encourages her to continue making outstanding contributions to the field.