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Unlocking the Microbial World: How Tiny Organisms Protect Our Planet

Education

• Ph.D., Yale University, 2016

Research Interests

• Functional ecology and environmental change
• Theoretical ecology
• Microbial food web
• Eco-evolutionary dynamics

Research Description

Our lab investigates the complexity of ecological systems to understand how they self-organize, adapt, and transform across space and time. We ask big-picture questions such as:

- How do individual interactions scale up to shape entire ecosystems?

- What forces structure biodiversity, food webs, and ecosystem productivity?

- Can we make sense of—or even predict—ecological change in a diverse, dynamic, and noisy world?

To address these questions, we blend theoretical and empirical approaches, including developing ecological theory and models, building experimental “micro-ecosystems” in the lab, and analyzing large-scale datasets. We also leverage innovative tools and technologies like high-throughput fluid imaging, molecular techniques, data science, and computational modeling. While our research is broadly applicable across systems and taxa, we have a special interest in microbial food webs. Despite being tiny, microbes are immensely diverse, essential to all ecosystems, and highly tractable for experiments—making them powerful models for studying ecological and evolutionary processes. A central focus of our work is understanding how organismal traits mediate responses to environmental change, and how those individual-level responses scale up to reshape populations, communities, and whole ecosystems.

Ultimately, we aim to uncover fundamental rules underlying ecological complexity while also generating insights that inform the stewardship of ecosystems in a changing world.

Selected Publications

1. Wieczynski, D. J., P. Singla, A. Doan, A. Singleton, Z.-Y. Han, S. Votzke, A. Yammine, et al. 2021. Linking species traits and demography to explain complex temperature responses across levels of organization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118:e2104863118.
2. Wieczynski, D. J., H. V. Moeller, and J. P. Gibert. 2023a. Mixotrophic microbes create carbon tipping points under warming. Functional Ecology 37:1774–1786.
3. Wieczynski, D. J., K. M. Yoshimura, E. R. Denison, S. Geisen, J. M. DeBruyn, A. J. Shaw, D. J. Weston, et al. 2023b. Viral infections likely mediate microbial controls on ecosystem responses to global warming. FEMS Microbiology Ecology 99:fiad016.
4. Wieczynski, D. J., B. Boyle, V. Buzzard, S. M. Duran, A. N. Henderson, C. M. Hulshof, A. J. Kerkhoff, et al. 2019. Climate shapes and shifts functional biodiversity in forests worldwide. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116:587–592.
5. Wieczynski, D. J., P. E. Turner, and D. A. Vasseur. 2018. Temporally Autocorrelated Environmental Fluctuations Inhibit the Evolution of Stress Tolerance. The American Naturalist 191:E195–E207.

Scholarly Acitivites