Eric L. Berlow is an American

ecologist Ecology () is the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere level. Ecology overlaps wi ...

and

data scientist Data science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge and insights from noisy, structured and unstructured data, and apply knowledge from data across a bro ...

. He co-founded a visual data interface company, which was acquired by Rakuten Inc. in 2016. He now runs Vibrant Data Labs, a social impact data science group currently focused the building on an open-source framework for tracking the flows of money to climate mitigation and resilience efforts on the ground. Prior to Vibrant Data Labs, Berlow was the founding director of the

University of California The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Franci ...

's first science and education institute inside

Yosemite National Park Yosemite National Park ( ) is an American national park in California, surrounded on the southeast by Sierra National Forest and on the northwest by Stanislaus National Forest. The park is managed by the National Park Service and covers an ...

which facilitated efforts to leverage data for informing

conservation Conservation is the preservation or efficient use of resources, or the conservation of various quantities under physical laws. Conservation may also refer to: Environment and natural resources * Nature conservation, the protection and managem ...

policy and

natural resource management Natural resource management (NRM) is the management of natural resources such as land, water, soil, plants and animals, with a particular focus on how management affects the quality of life for both present and future generations (stewardship) ...

. Berlow is internationally recognized for his research on ecological complexity, with articles in ''Nature'', ''Science'', and ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences''. He is best known for his

TED TED may refer to: Economics and finance * TED spread between U.S. Treasuries and Eurodollar Education * ''Türk Eğitim Derneği'', the Turkish Education Association ** TED Ankara College Foundation Schools, Turkey ** Transvaal Education Depa ...

talks on simplifying complexity and finding hidden patterns in complex data. Berlow has received a

Fellowship, a

Senior Fellowship, an

Alexander Von Humboldt Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (14 September 17696 May 1859) was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, ...

Fellowship, a

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

Post-doctoral Fellowship, and a National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis Fellowship. He was named one of the top 100 Creatives by ''Origin'' magazine.

Education

Berlow completed his undergraduate studies at Brown University in 1988, earning a B.A. degree in biology. He received a

Doctor of Philosophy A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

degree from

Oregon State University Oregon State University (OSU) is a public land-grant, research university in Corvallis, Oregon. OSU offers more than 200 undergraduate-degree programs along with a variety of graduate and doctoral degrees. It has the 10th largest engineering c ...

in 1995 in

marine ecology Marine ecosystems are the largest of Earth's aquatic ecosystems and exist in waters that have a high salt content. These systems contrast with freshwater ecosystems, which have a lower salt content. Marine waters cover more than 70% of the surf ...

with a thesis on ecological complexity, supervised by

Jane Lubchenco Jane Lubchenco (born December 4, 1947) is an American environmental scientist and marine ecologist who teaches and conducts research at Oregon State University. Her research interests include interactions between the environment and human well-be ...

and

Bruce A. Menge Bruce A. Menge is an American ocean ecologist. He has spent over forty years studying the processes that drive the dynamics of natural communities. His fields of interest include: structure and dynamics of marine meta-ecosystems, responses of co ...

. He was a

Postdoctoral Fellow at the

University of California at Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant uni ...

working with Carla D'Antonio on the ecology of mountain

ecosystem An ecosystem (or ecological system) consists of all the organisms and the physical environment with which they interact. These biotic and abiotic components are linked together through nutrient cycles and energy flows. Energy enters the syste ...

s in the Sierra Nevada.

Career

Berlow's research career has focused on ecology, food webs, and networks. He was the founding director of the University of California Sierra Nevada Research Station in

. Examples of his highly cited network ecology publications include a 2009 paper in PNAS for which he was the lead author focused on predicting interaction strengths in food webs, a 1999 paper in Nature on "Strong effects of weak interactions in ecological communities", and a 1994 paper in Ecological Monographs on the keystone species concept. He co-authored a paper that was among the top twenty most cited papers in Environment and Ecology from 1998-2008 entitled "Biodiversity - global biodiversity scenarios for the year 2100". Berlow has also contributed to

through his work on alpine meadows and threatened amphibians. In 2013 Berlow co-founded Vibrant Data Inc., a cloud-based data analytics platform for analyzing complex relationships. As a speaker at the

Conferences, Berlow has given three presentations on topics including Simplifying Complexity, Mapping Ideas Worth Spreading, and The Ecological Structure of Collaboration.

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Berlow, Eric Living people Year of birth missing (living people)