GT Biology 2012 PhD graduate Douglas Rasher won the George Mercer Award from the Ecological Society of America this year. This prestigious award recognizes the best paper published in Ecology over the past 2 years by an ecologist younger than 40 years old. Rasher, now a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Maine, provides rich new insights for the management and conservation of coral reefs in his 2013 “Consumer diversity interacts with prey defenses to drive ecosystem function,” in Ecology. The study, which he conducted as a graduate student at the Georgia Institute of Technology, shows that interactions between algal defenses and herbivore tolerances create an essential role for consumer diversity in the functioning and resilience of coral reefs.
Georgia Institute of Technology
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