Predicting species distributions relies on our ability to estimate the costs of life under current climatic conditions, and to predict how costs will change under future climate scenarios. Mammals are endotherms, which allows them to perform optimally over a wide range of environmental temperatures. However, the energetic costs of maintaining an elevated body temperature varies widely over the range of environmental temperatures experienced by an animal over its lifetime. Surprisingly, our understanding of the costs of living and the relationship between environmental temperatures and performance in mammals, is poor, especially with regards to the effects of high environmental temperature and humidity. Using mammals as model organisms, my research seeks to address gaps in our fundamental understanding of mammalian energetics using a combination of laboratory and field-based projects aimed at elucidating the effects of activity, humidity, and high ambient temperature on the performance (and ultimately the distribution) of endotherms.

I am an evolutionary and ecological physiologist primarily interested in the comparative energetics and the evolution of mammalian temperature regulation. My research lies at the intersections of comparative physiology, ecology and evolutionary biology, and the synergies between these disciplines. Through field and laboratory based experiments, I seek to understand how rigidity or flexibility in metabolism and body temperature regulation affects the energetics of a species, and how their evolutionary history has shaped these patterns. The data obtained through studying thermoregulation and energetics can have multiple applications. By understanding the dynamics of the relationship between an animal and its thermal environment, we can better predict energy budgets and responses to changes in climate and resource availability.

My overall goals are to improve our theoretical and applied understanding of the effects of climate on ecological systems. To this end, I develop ecological and physiological approaches that bring new mechanistic insights into how environments affect organisms. Such insights are crucial for understanding ecological responses to climate change and for developing management and conservation strategies that can help species maintain their ecological niches under future climates.

I am a Senior Lecturer(an equivalent title to Assistant Professor in the USA) at the School of Zoology of Tel Aviv University since 2018. I earned my Ph.D. in Tel Aviv University’s Department of Zoology in 2010 and completed a postdoctoral appointment at the School of Life Sciences of Arizona State University in 2017. For my dissertation at Tel Aviv University, I was primarily concerned with understanding how ecological, physiological, and evolutionary forces shape organismal activity patterns in the Judean desert, a relatively harsh and unpredictable environment. During my postdoctoral appointment, I have shifted my model animals to reptiles, studying the biological effects of climate change using empirical observations and individual-based models. Currently, my lab broadly explores subjects in ecological physiology and climate change, with a strong emphasis on the relationships between animals and the environment. In particular, I integrate remote sensing data with microclimate and individual-based models on the one hand, and empirical observations at climatic gradients on the other.

My research focuses on linking organismal processes to population-level patterns using integrative empirical and quantitative approaches. My lab combines data on movement, reproduction, and life-history traits—derived from telemetry, histology, otolith microchemistry, and genetics—with statistical and modeling frameworks to examine spatial structure, reproductive dynamics, and resilience of marine fish populations under environmental stressors. A central theme of my work is translating individual-level variation in behavior and physiology into models that inform population dynamics and fisheries management. This has led to the development of the reproductive resilience paradigm, which addresses the underlying issue that drivers of reproductive success in marine fish differ from that of terrestrial vertebrates and that both reproductive processes/behavior and drivers of early life history need to be integrated to assess reproductive success and population growth.

I am a a fisheries scientist with extensive experience leading interdisciplinary research programs in marine ecology. I am a senior investigator and laboratory head, with a long-standing record of mentoring graduate students, technicians, and postdoctoral researchers, and of building collaborative research teams across institutions and disciplines. My career spans applied and fundamental research, with sustained engagement at the science–management interface. I have taken on leadership roles in collaborative research networks and large, multi-investigator projects, and I am committed to systems thinking and integrative, team-based science.

My research develops quantitative tools for understanding and improving complex systems where collective outcomes emerge from many interacting parts. I integrate experimental design, statistical inference, and mechanistic modeling to link individual-level behavior, environmental variation, and system-level performance.
A central theme is collective dynamics in social insects: identifying when and why robust behavioral regimes arise (including bistability), and how transitions between regimes can be detected and interpreted from data. In parallel, I advance practical methodologies for measurement and decision-making under constraints, especially strategies that reduce sampling effort and bias while maintaining accuracy. This includes power-aware study design across hierarchical biological systems (e.g., individuals vs. groups) and principled approaches for estimating behavioral state distributions and transition rates from limited observations. A second thrust translates these ideas to engineering workflows, where uncertainty, cost, and heterogeneity drive the need for efficient qualification and reporting standards. Across application areas (from ecology to cold logistics and archaeology) my work emphasizes reproducible pipelines that combine statistics, dynamical-systems thinking, and machine learning to produce actionable insight and generalizable methods.

I’m a former U.S. Army combat medic who found my way into complexity science through an unexpected comparison: ant colonies. Studying social insects revealed an organizational logic almost opposite to the military (distributed control rather than strict hierarchy) and that contrast hooked me. Since then, I’ve built a research career around understanding how collective behavior, constraints, and feedback shape real-world systems. My work spans designing and executing experiments in animal systems, collaborating with biomedical companies, and developing methods for qualification and reliability in additive manufacturing. Across these domains, I use the toolkit of complexity theory (dynamical systems, machine learning, dimensionality reduction, optimization) to connect data, mechanism, and function. The goal is a more holistic picture of how systems organize, adapt, and perform, and how we can measure and improve them with rigorous, efficient experiments.

I have experiences in integrating empirical data and mechanistic models to tackle difficult questions. For example, I examined hypothesis about the evolution of viviparity at a global scale by mapping soil temperatures into developmental traits (Ma et al. 2018, Global Ecology and Biogeography). By modeling the pattern revealed by a control experiment testing the effect of embryonic movement on sex ratio of TSD species, I predicted that such embryonic movement could buffer the variation of sex ratio among seasons and across latitudes (Ye et al. 2019 Current Biology; co-first author). I developed a life-history model to compare the impacts of climate change on viviparous and oviparous squamates (under review). I also incorporated the plasticity of embryonic thermal tolerance into a mechanistic model to reveal how the plasticity would affect the heat stress experienced by developing embryos (under review).

I am a conservation physiologist interested in exploring how species adapt to thermal gradients through time and space, and how they would respond to global change. I have a particular interest in integrating empirical studies and mechanistic models to reveal ecological patterns across scales. I’m currently working with David Wilcove as a postdoctoral researcher in Princeton University. I acquired a PhD degree of ecology in 2017 at Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (supervised by Wei-guo Du) and did a two-year postdoctoral research in the same lab. I also did a 1-year internship in University of Washington (supervised by Raymond Huey and Lauren Buckley) during my PhD.

My research focuses on the physiology and ecology of insect flight; molecular genetics of disease resistance in tropical trees; and integrative biology.

Marty's is generally interested in the ecophysiology of wild vertebrates, especially birds and mammals. Research in the lab now addresses what physiological and behavioral traits enable some individuals to have disproportionate effects on the spread and dilution of infectious diseases, how molecular epigenetic mechanisms such as DNA methylation underlie the phenotypic plasticity that enables some organisms to be exceptional colonizers, and how body size constrains the architecture of the immune systems and other defenses of species.

Marty earned a BS and an MS in Biology from Virginia Commonwealth University, followed by an MS and PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton. He then spent 3 years as a postdoc in Psychology and Neuroscience at The Ohio State University and joined the University of South Florida in 2007 as an Assistant Professor. Since 2018, he has been Professor in Global and Planetary Health in the USF College of Public Health.

My research program investigates the genetic and physiological mechanisms by which organisms maintain fitness under stress. Our lab uses both model organism (Drosophila) and natural populations of freshwater mollusks to address genotype to phenotype relationships.

I am an integrative biologist by training. I did my PhD in marine ecophysiology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. My postdoctoral training, supported by a fellowship from NSF EPSCoR, was in evolutionary physiology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.