Will Cornwell
Professor at UNSW Australia
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolWill Cornwell is a professor and community-evolution-ecosystem ecologist with 12+ years of academic experience studying plant and fungal roles in ecosystem function. Based in Sydney after research stints across San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Vancouver, he leads a lab that blends fieldwork and theory to uncover how aboveground and belowground organisms shape communities and ecosystems. His career spans postdoctoral and research positions at UBC and VU Amsterdam and a long tenure at UNSW, where he progressed from Associate Professor to Professor. Trained at Cornell, Cambridge (MPhil), and Stanford (PhD), he couples classical natural history and rigorous experimental design with modern ecological synthesis. Will’s work increasingly highlights the hidden influence of soil fungi—those “mysterious species” that mediate ecosystem processes—and leverages interdisciplinary approaches to make these belowground dynamics visible. Colleagues value his ability to connect detailed field observations to broad ecological patterns that inform conservation and management.
13 years of coding experience
Master of Philosophy (MPhil), Plant Sciences, Master of Philosophy (MPhil), Plant Sciences at University of CambridgeBachelor of Science (BS), Natural Resources Management and Policy, Bachelor of Science (BS), Natural Resources Management and Policy at Cornell UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (PhD), Biology/Biological Sciences, General, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Biology/Biological Sciences, General at Stanford University
Spanish, Portuguese, English
Stackoverflow
251reputation
6kreached
1answer
5questions
Github Skills (94)
versioning10
git10
soil10
stable10
r-package10
decomposition10
version-control10
traits10
r9
lookup-table9
nomenclature9
biodiversity9
rmarkdown9
database8
api8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
traitecoevo/growthform
Dec 2018 - Feb 2019
Versioned database that includes growth form information for the world's land plants, currently >140,000 species
Contributions:5 releases, 44 commits, 1 PR in 2 months
database
jesstytam/specieshindex
Jul 2020 - May 2022
Contributions:72 commits, 63 pushes, 50 comments in 1 year 10 months
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