Dr. Robbie Burger | Burger Lab

Abstract:
Life is extraordinarily diverse — from fast-living microbes to long-lived giants, from communities in local green spaces to the global biosphere, and across timescales spanning Earth’s deep history to rapid environmental change today. Why do some animals live fast while others live slow? How do the dynamics of epidemics scale with population size? And why does biodiversity follow similar — or surprisingly different — patterns across mountains, cities, and islands?

In this talk, I’ll explore how data and theory reveal general scaling principles linking biological pattern and process from metabolism and life history to epidemics and biodiversity. Drawing on research with students and collaborators, I’ll show how scaling across levels of biological organization can reveal unexpected patterns, challenge established ideas, and open new questions. I’ll conclude with the Equal Fitness Paradigm, a framework that connects metabolism, life history, and demography through a common energetic currency and points toward new ways of understanding of how life persists and changes across scales.