The Haydon Group
Current Research
I am interested in just about any ecological process - regardless of the scale at which it occurs. Whether it is how an RNA virus adopts a particular replication strategy within a single cell, how a malaria or trypanosome parasite is regulated within a host, why some populations cycle, why multiple populations cycle synchronously together, how metapopulations persist, how landscape heterogeneity is maintained by disturbance, or how complexity influences ecological stability–these are all more and less obviously problems that benefit from a fundamentally ecological and quantitative (if not mathematical) approach.
Systems approaches to ecology and epidemiology
A modern 'systems' approach that imposes a multi-scale perspective on research formulation is now increasingly advocated and adopted across the biological sciences. To ecologists, this is how we’ve always studied complexity. A multi-scale perspective has two major advantages: First, it broadens the community of scientists one deals with in tackling a particular problem, forcing interdisciplinary communication, which of course is always a good thing. Second, it is often the case that while we have questions about a pattern or process at one scale, data can only, or are most easily gathered, at another. In these cases a multi-scale approach, in which we use models to link what we see at one scale to predictions at another, is essential.