Today, we are pleased to be welcoming a new member of the Methods in Ecology and Evolution Associate Editor Board. Will Pearse joins us from McGill University in Canada and you can find out a little more about him below.

Will Pearse

“I am an evolutionary ecologist and use phylogeny to link the evolution of species’ traits with their ecological community assembly. I’m interested in phylogenetic methods, macro-evolution of species’ traits, community assembly and developing new statistical tools for all of the above.”

Will is a former winner of the Robert May Early Career Researcher Award. He won the prize in 2013 for his Applications article ‘phyloGenerator: an automated phylogeny generation tool for ecologists‘ (co-authored with Andy Purvis). phyloGenerator is an open-source, stand-alone Python program, that makes use of pre-existing sequence data and taxonomic information to largely automate the estimation of phylogenies. He has also recently had a paper on a R package that allows for measurement, modelling and simulation of phylogenetic structure in ecological data published in Bioinformatics. The article, ‘pez: phylogenetics for the environmental sciences‘, was co-authored with Marc Cadotte, Jeannine Cavender-Bares, Anthony Ives, Caroline Tucker, Steve Walker and Matthew Helmus.

We are thrilled to welcome Will as a new Associate Editor and we look forward to working with him on the journal.