Russell Dinnage, Ph.D.
Hi there,
My name is Russell Dinnage and I am a biologist working in evolutionary community ecology.
I am currently doing a post-doc with CSIRO in Perth, Australia. I got my PhD at the University of Toronto, Canada. All opinions expressed on this website are my own.
My research is focused in understanding the formation, maintenance, and properties of component ecological communities, particularly with reference to the evolutionary history of the organisms that live in and make up those communities. I mainly work with plant and insect communities (preferably both at the same time), but also frequently digital organisms of my own devising which inhabitat my ecosystem of computers.
My work here at CSIRO is focused on developing new tools to facilitate rapid biodiversity assessment using next generation sequencing technology, specifically whole genome metagenomics. I am working on analyzing samples of insects collected from a survey in the biologically little known Kimberley region of North-west Australia. Besides rapid biodiversity assessment, I am exploring how this metagenomics data can be used to answer ecological questions, by extracting information about evolutionary relationships and combining that with distribution data to model metacommunity dynamics.
Other scientific interests include Bayesian statistics, machine learning and its application to ecology, and scientific visualization.
To get a better idea of what I do, please browse my publication list, my blog, or my twitter feed (all linked from the sidebar to the left). Thanks for visiting my homepage!