Selina Våge

Selina Våge is a researcher at the Department of Biological Sciences and leader of the the TMS project “Self-similarity in ecosystem organization – From simple laws of microbial ecology to scale-invariant theory of ecosystem complexity (SIMPLEX)”. She took her PhD in theoretical microbial ecology at the Department of Biological Sciences in 2014, and has undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Zurich and University of Tromsø, respectively.

She is primarily interested in the linkage between complexity in the observable world and how we can understand this from underlying laws of nature. In her TMS Starting Grant Project, Selina focuses in particular on ecosystem organization, and how complexity at different scales (ranging from intra-species diversity to food web structures and large-scale biomass scaling laws) may be traced back to simple biological principles such as fundamental trade-offs between competitive and defensive abilities of organisms. Her research thus contributes to the development of general ecological theory.