Bartumeus, Frederic
ICREA Research Professor at Centre for Advanced Studies of Blanes (CSIC - CEAB) and at Centre de Recerca Ecològica i Aplicacions Forestals (CREAF).
Life & Medical Sciences
Short biography
Frederic Bartumeus is an ICREA Research Professor in Computational and Theoretical Ecology at the Centre for Advanced Studies of Blanes (CEAB-CSIC) since November 2013. He also holds the same status at CREAF since 2016. He holds a MSc in Plankton Ecology (1997), and a PhD in Biological Sciences (2005) from the University of Barcelona, Spain, where he applied random walk and generalized diffusion theory to develop animal search theory. He joined the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, USA (2006-2009), where he went in depth on the stochastic modeling of animal movement and dispersal. Back to Spain, he completed his postdoctoral research on vector-borne diseases at the Institut Català del Clima (IC3). With a Ramón y Cajal position (2010) he founded his own lab, the Movement Ecology Laboratory, focused on animal movement (including humans) and search strategies, disease vectors, and computational ecology.
Research interests
My research is focused in the emerging field of movement ecology, which aims to reveal the complex forces that drive movement and dispersal patterns of animals (including humans). Improved tracking technology (GPS, bio-loggers, smart-phones) demands an integrative view, with new computational tools and modeling frameworks to understand unprecedented levels of detail from a constantly growing number of species. I am contributing to this scientific revolution based on a broad, highly collaborative and interdisciplinary research program, founded solidly on statistical physics and quantitative ecology. A central question in my research is how animals use information and their motor properties to optimize search strategies. The mechanistic linkage between behavioral processes and movement patterns is also key to understanding globalised problems such as the perpetuation of social inequality among humans or the spread of vector-borne infectious diseases.