Rate My Professor Travis Ingram

Travis Ingram is an Associate Professor in the Department of Zoology at the University of Otago, where he serves as Director of the Ecology Degree Programme. He specializes in eco-evolutionary dynamics within New Zealand's freshwater ecosystems, investigating causes and consequences of individual niche variation, local adaptation and landlocking in freshwater fish, phylogenetic comparative methods, and food web interactions. Ingram's research group examines the interplay between evolutionary and ecological processes shaping biodiversity, with projects on Chatham Island freshwater systems, intraguild predation effects on specialization, and microplastic impacts on lake communities. He teaches courses including ECOL 211 Ecology of Communities and Ecosystems, ECOL 314 Pacific Field Ecology, ZOOL 222 Evolutionary Biology, ZOOL 318 Freshwater Ecology, and ZOOL 416 Freshwater Ecology, and oversees the ECOL postgraduate programme.

Ingram earned his PhD in Zoology from the University of British Columbia in 2011, with a thesis on the evolution of the trophic niche and food web structure supervised by Dolph Schluter and Jonathan B. Shurin. He previously completed a BSc Honours in Biology at the University of Victoria in 2005. His postdoctoral training included an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University from 2011 to 2013 under Jonathan B. Losos, and a fellowship in Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin in 2013 with Daniel I. Bolnick. Ingram joined Otago as Lecturer in Zoology in 2013, promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2019. Awards include the Young Investigators Award from the American Society of Naturalists (2014), Thomas M. Frost Award from the Ecological Society of America (2012), and NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2011-2013). He has secured funding such as the Marsden Fast-Start Grant (NZ$300,000, 2015-2018). Key publications feature 'SURFACE: detecting convergent evolution from comparative data by fitting Ornstein-Uhlenbeck models with stepwise Akaike Information Criterion' (Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 2013), 'The dimensionality of individual niche variation' (Ecology, 2018), and 'Intraguild predation drives evolutionary niche shift in threespine stickleback' (Evolution, 2012, Thomas M. Frost Award winner). Ingram is Associate Editor for American Naturalist and Ecology and Evolution, and has given invited seminars at institutions including University of Queensland (2018) and Victoria University of Wellington (2018).