About
Hi, this is Ming! I am a postdoc at Dunn School of Pathology at the University of Oxford. My research focuses on biological dynamics over time, which lie at the heart of how natural selection shapes living systems. These dynamics can include changes in population size or shifts in gene frequency within a population. More broadly, they are driven by three major forces: abiotic conditions, biotic interactions within species, and interactions between species. To understand the causes and consequences of these dynamics, I combine analytical theory, numerical methods, simulations, advanced statistics, machine learning, and experiments. My research aims to understand all three in depth.
Theme 1: Abiotic conditions
Abiotic conditions such as temperature, rainfall, humidity, salinity, and pH are fundamental to biological dynamics. They help determine which species are favoured under a given set of environmental conditions. At first glance, these factors may seem straightforward, but in nature they are constantly changing across space and time. That variability makes it much harder to predict whether species will persist, decline, or adapt. Theoretical frameworks are therefore essential for uncovering the general rules that link environmental change to biological outcomes.
Considering these environmental variations, we have looked into
- The classic bet-hedging (between specialist and generalist strategies)
- Coexistence between specialists
- Environmental predictabilities
- The functional trait diversity
One notable and consistent result is that we found the temporal scales of environmental fluctuations usually have contrasting effects (e.g., promote vs obstruct species coexistence).
Theme 2: Biotic interactions within species
Biological interactions within species, among individuals in the same population, are another major driver of biological dynamics. These social interactions can involve cooperation, conflict, or exploitation, and they strongly influence how populations evolve over time. In particular, they shape whether helpful traits can persist, how conflict is controlled, and how more integrated forms of life emerge. These same principles also help explain major evolutionary transitions, such as the origin of genomes, multicellular organisms, and superorganisms.
Our work on this theme spans across several topics:
- Division of labour: mechanisms under clonal groups, non-clonal groups, the effects of group structures
- Cheat-cooperator dynamics: manipulative cheat and the mechanisms of oscillating dynamics
- Social immunity (under revision in PNAS)
Theme 3: Interactions between species
The third major driver of biological dynamics is the interaction between species. These interactions include competition, predation, cross-feeding, and facilitation, and together they create the network structure of ecological communities. Once many species are linked in this way, even simple local interactions can generate complex community-level dynamics. Understanding when such systems are stable, predictable, or fragile is therefore one of the central challenges in ecology.
One question we have investigated is the classic problem of species diversity and ecosystem stability: does adding more species make a community more, or less, stable? By combining experiments with general theory, our work aims to clarify a debate that has shaped community ecology for more than 50 years. (Papers under review or in preparation.)
If you would like to reach out, please contact: ming.liu.ac [at] gmail.com. I’m also a freelance photographer with ~15 years of experience. Feel free to explore my photographic work here!