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Stephen Pacala is the Frederick D. Petrie Professor Emeritus in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University and a senior scholar at the High Meadows Environmental Institute. His research focuses on the processes that govern ecological communities and the interplay of community and ecosystem-level processes with global climate variables. He is known for developing, calibrating, and testing mathematical models that explain ecological structure and function, particularly concerning the global carbon cycle. Over the past years, he has created methods to scale up individual-based models to that of entire communities and ecosystems, utilizing gap models of vegetation that govern the behavior of large-scale simulation models. His global model makes predictions about the large-scale distribution of biomes associated with biogeochemical fluxes and provides specific local predictions related to physiological carbon gain and water loss, community composition dynamics, and the outcomes of spatial competition among plant species. Pacala's ongoing empirical work involves field studies in Amazonia and the northern Midwest, focusing on understanding feedback mechanisms between climate and vegetation and the effects of human land use on ecosystem stability. He continues to explore critical theoretical questions related to terrestrial biosphere interactions with climate and biodiversity's impact on global ecosystem function.
GRE scores are not accepted. Ph.D. is the primary degree; students are not required to hold an M.S.E. prior to admission.