David M. Post

David M. Post is a research scientist and academic administrator. He is currently a professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University and the Vice President (Academic Affairs)., Dean of Faculty, and Visiting Wong Ngit Liong Professor at Yale-NUS College, the first liberal arts college in Singapore. Post is an aquatic ecologist who studies food webs, evolution, and stable isotopes in lakes and rivers in Connecticut and Kenya.

He obtained his B.S. in Wildlife Ecology in 1992 and his M.S. in zoology in 1996 from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Cornell University in 2000.

Academic career Post's academic career at Yale University began in 2002 as assistant professor at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He was promoted to associate professor in 2008 and full Professor in 2014. and Vice President (Academic Affairs) in 2022. As part of the college's senior leadership team, Post oversees all academic programming within the college with a key focus on sustaining its curriculum, enabling faculty and student research, and encouraging student and faculty development. His priorities include maintaining excellence in teaching and research, supporting faculty, mentoring, and developing areas of distinction among the divisions and majors.

Research Post's research tests long-standing questions about food web structure and dynamics, the influence of environmental change on community structure and ecosystem function, spatial linkages among ecosystems, and the importance of interactions between ecology and evolution for community and ecosystem processes. and development and application of stable isotopes methods. His recent work has explored the implications of intraspecific variation and rapid evolution for ecological communities and ecosystems; and the role of wildlife in moving organic matter among ecosystems in the Maasai Mara, Kenya

In 2014, The New York Times featured his study on alewives in Connecticut lakes where he is tracking the outcome of the species' restoration at Rogers Lake. One of his notable research was the study in 2017 on how the annual mass drownings of Serengeti wildebeest can have positive impacts on the Mara River ecosystem.

Awards and honours Post received the R.H. Whittaker Award for outstanding oral presentation and Cole Award for outstanding publication from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Annual Symposium, Cornell University.

He earned the 2002 Raymond L. Lindeman Award from the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography for his 2000 publication "Ecosystem size determines food-chain length in lakes"

Post was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2019 and a member of The Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering in 2020.

Notable publications Source:

Post, D.M., M.L. Pace, and N.G. Hairston Jr. 2000. Ecosystem size determines food-chain length in lakes. Nature 405:1047–1049. doi: 10.1038/35016565 Post, D.M. 2002. Using stable isotopes to estimate trophic position: models, methods, and assumptions. Ecology, 83:703-718. doi: 10.1890/0012-9658(2002)083[0703:USITET]2.0.CO;2 Post, D.M., D.A. Arrington, C.A. Layman, G. Takimoto, J. Quattrochi, and C. G. Montaña. 2007. Getting to the fat of the matter: models, methods and assumptions for dealing with lipids in stable isotope analyses. Oecologia 152:179–189. doi:10.1007/s00442-006-0630-x