Theory is a critical component of the research process. Yet, early career scientists receive little training on how to design and interpret theory and, thus, how to evaluate when theory has successfully answered the research question. We will describe a framework we recently developed (Shaw et al. 2024) with six ways to create a verbal framing for theoretical models in ecology and evolutionary biology. We characterize these framings as different 'personas' one might adopt as a theorist: Advocate, Explainer, Instigator, Mediator, Semantician, and Tinkerer. Currently, we are studying how these personas are used across both theoretical and empirical research in ecology and evolutionary biology. This will be a discussion-based event and will include time for attendees to fill out our survey to help advance this research.
March 20th at 8 AM PST.
Register here!
The Society for Modeling and Theory in Population Biology is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.
