A warm Darwin-welcome to Junkun Ren who recently joined the group.

The Darwin Project is thrilled to add a further stellar new MIT-WHOI Joint Program graduate student to its ranks this fall.

Junkun Ren is a first-year graduate student in Biology in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program. Before joining us she worked at the Theoretical Ecology Lab at Peking University in China.

Junkun credits an infectious disease transmission modeling course the took with triggering her interest in modeling ecological interactions and patterns. She says, “Starting from there, I became quite interested in mathematical ecology and biology, the amazing interactions and phenomena in nature, and understanding their underlying mechanisms.”

It was after particularly enjoying a paper by Mick on a food-web model of marine plankton Junkun recognized her common interest with work in the Darwin group. “I felt like our interests are a great match so I reached out to Mick,” she says.

Junkun holds a bachelor’s degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in food science and engineering and a master’s from Harvard School of Public Health in epidemiology. She also worked for one year in the space medicine innovations lab at Dartmouth as a research assistant and worked for another year in the theoretical ecology lab at Peking University.

Junkun’s email is junkun.ren@whoi.edu

Story image: When not mathing ecology and biology, Junkun says she likes reading novels a lot, especially Chinese ancient ones. She also enjoys playing video games.