I interviewed awesome ecologists at the 2011 Ecological Society of America meeting in exchange for reader donations, which paid for my conference attendance. This is one in a series of posts about those interviews.

I met Colin Kremer several years ago at a research station in the middle of nowhere. It was a pretty idyllic summer. When we weren’t working, he taught us how to do the Charleston, and he was always up for a good conversation about ecology and math.

Now he’s a graduate student at Michigan State University. In the interview below he’s got a lot of really interesting things to say. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be an ecologist, or why scientists can get so excited about data and modeling, this interview will definitely answer a lot of your questions. A few of the things he brushed on during our conversation: the role of activism in a scientist’s life, the super cool projects he’s working on, how to choose a project for grad school, and why going to the annual ESA meeting is such a great experience.

Listen to the interview with Colin Kremer [mp3 download, ~30 min]

For more details on one of his projects, listen to this snippet [mp3 download, ~2 min], which didn’t make it into the cut-down interview above because it’s a little more technical.  You can learn even more about some of his projects by checking out a few of Colin’s collaborators: Mridul K. Thomas has a great post on some of the ocean phytoplankton work and Carrie E. Seltzer’s website has some cool info on seed predation by giant rats in Tanzania.