New assistant professorship on ecosystem adaptability
Catalina Chaparro-Pedraza has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant and will begin her research at the University of Basel on 1 March. Her work will focus on how biodiversity responds to human-induced environmental changes.
17 February 2026
The President’s Board has appointed Professor Catalina Chaparro-Pedraza as assistant professor (without tenure track) at the Faculty of Science. Chaparro-Pedraza, who has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant, will take up her fixed-term professorship in the Department of Environmental Sciences on 1 March for the length of the grant.
She earned her doctorate in theoretical ecology at the University of Amsterdam in 2019 and then worked first as an independent postdoc and later as a Marie Curie postdoc at Eawag, the water research institute of the ETH Domain. Since 2025, she has been working as a group leader in Eawag.
In her research, she investigates how biodiversity reacts to man-made environmental changes. Her work studies how metabolic and physiological processes that shape organismal development, performance, and life-history strategies are altered by environmental stressors such as warming, resource limitation, and chemical disturbance.
Investigation of evolutionary and ecological mechanisms
When these stressors affect survival, growth, or reproduction at particular life stages, they can reshape the structure of entire plant and animal populations—much like human societies look and work very differently depending on whether they are dominated by children, working-age adults, or older generations.
By linking these organism-level responses to shifts in population structure and species interactions, Chaparro-Pedraza’s work connects physiology and metabolism with ecological community dynamics and ecosystem functioning.
Approaching dangerous tipping points
A key focus of her research studies the evolutionary and ecological mechanisms that sustain ecosystem resilience and prevent ecosystems from approaching dangerous tipping points, thresholds which, once crossed, can dramatically alter ecosystem functioning. In the coming years, her ERC project “Phenotipping” will combine experiments, mathematical modeling, and genomic analyses to uncover how adaptation shapes resilience in populations, ecological communities and ecosystems.
Chaparro-Pedraza and her research group will carry out this work at Eawag. By linking organismal physiology, species interactions, and ecosystem functioning, her research aims to improve our ability to anticipate tipping points and identify pathways that support the long-term stability of biodiversity in a rapidly changing world.
