I'm a postdoctoral researcher at Åbo Akademi University. My work asks what happens to ecosystems — particularly seafloor communities — when environmental conditions shift. The ecology and the quantitative methods carry equal weight; the experiments generate the questions the statistics have to answer.
Benthic ecology, functional traits, Arctic and temperate systems, and how biodiversity loss translates into shifts in ecosystem function. I work across scales: individual organism behaviour in controlled experiments, community-level multivariate analysis, and broader questions about what trait variation predicts under environmental change.
I study the animals and communities living on and in the seafloor, and how they respond when their environment changes — warming, acidification, physical disturbance. The goal is to understand what those responses mean for the broader health of the ocean: what gets cycled, what gets stored, what gets lost.
Research positions, expeditions, field sites, and collaborations across the Arctic, sub-Arctic, North Atlantic, and beyond. Click a marker for details.
Follow along on @tjw97.bsky.social for updates on research, fieldwork, and data science.
Williams et al. (2025) — Co-extinctions and co-compensatory species responses to climate change moderate ecosystem futures. Global Change Biology, 31(10), e70539. doi:10.1111/gcb.70539
Williams et al. (2025) showed that climate-driven species losses cascade through functionally dependent species in ways that standard biodiversity projections miss. Accounting for co-extinctions substantially changes the loss estimate — the gap between naive and cascade-corrected projections is large enough to matter for conservation planning.
When one species disappears, others that depend on it often follow. Williams et al. (2025) showed that this chain reaction means we've been underestimating how much biodiversity is at risk under climate change. The real number is considerably higher than most models predict.