Douglas McCauley is an Associate Professor at the University of California Santa Barbara and the Director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative – an applied research center based at UCSB’s Marine Science Institute that creates replicable, science-based solutions to improve ocean health. Prof. McCauley is a Sloan Research Fellow in the Ocean Sciences and member of World Economic Forum’s Friends of Ocean Action. Prof. McCauley has degrees in political science and biology from the University of California at Berkeley and a PhD in Biology from Stanford. He conducted postdoctoral research at Stanford, Princeton, and UC Berkeley. Research by Dr. McCauley has been published in leading research journals such as Science, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA and has been featured in outlets such as the New York Times, BBC, TIME, and US National Public Radio.
Research
The McCauley Lab uses a diverse suite of methods to answer pressing questions in community and ecosystem ecology. Research in the lab is directed at understanding how community structure influences ecosystem dynamics, in determining how ecosystems are interactively and energetically coupled to one another, and quantifying how humans perturb these dynamics and shape patterns of biodiversity. The lab engages these questions using tools from the disciplines of community ecology, biogeochemistry, spatial analysis, ecological modeling, conservation biology, and anthropology. An important aim of research in the McCauley Lab is to generate results that both advance the pure science of ecology and that can be of practical service to decision makers responsible for shaping the future of our environment. We conduct research in a variety of ecological contexts (e.g. coral reefs, tropical savannas, Californian ecosystems) pursuing the philosophy that first principles in ecology can be most effectively derived via observation of pattern and process in diverse settings.
Education
- PhD, Biology/Hopkins Marine Station, Stanford University
- B.A., Integrative Biology, University of California at Berkeley
- B.A., Political Science, University of California at Berkeley
Courses Taught
- ENV S 133: Biodiversity and Conservation Biology