Craig Osenberg, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Zoology

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

2002 Awardee

Craig Osenberg’s research on population and community ecology seeks to develop predictive frameworks for understanding how species interactions, organismal traits and environmental factors influence the abundance and dynamics of ecological systems.

He uses a combination of field observation, laboratory and field experimentation, mathematical modeling and quantitative synthesis. His work on the application of meta-analysis in ecology aims to transform the way ecologists design their studies and apply inferential statistics.

Osenberg’s prominent role in the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) brings even more recognition to UF’s historic presence in ecology. NCEAS is a think tank that sets the framework for ecological studies and determines future directions in ecology research.

Osenberg is working in the Florida Keys to develop population dynamics models to assist in fisheries management. Density-dependence is the critical feature of ecological processes that regulate system dynamics, and it remains a contentious issue in ecology. Osenberg’s meta-analyses on density-dependence in reef fish aims to unify apparently inconsistent results that have led to considerable controversy in the field.

Last year, Osenberg gave the inaugural W.T. Edmondson Memorial Lecture at the University of Washington, and his papers were cited in more than 110 publications. He is the editor-in-chief of Oecologia, one of the top-ranked international ecological journals, and serves as chair of the Aquatic Section of the Ecological Society of America, the leading ecological society in the world.