Rate My Professor Nathan Wisnoski

Nathan Wisnoski is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Mississippi State University, where he joined in August 2022. He received his Ph.D. in Biology with a focus on Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior, along with a minor in Environmental Studies from the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, from Indiana University Bloomington in 2020. Earlier, he earned a B.S. in Biology – Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, with a minor in Business from the McCombs School of Business, from The University of Texas at Austin in 2013. Prior to his faculty position, Wisnoski served as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Wyoming from July 2020 to August 2022. His previous appointments include Graduate Research and Teaching Assistant at Indiana University from August 2014 to May 2020 and Lab and Field Technician at the University of Texas at Austin in spring 2014.

Wisnoski's research specializes in metacommunity ecology, microbial ecology, dormancy, dispersal, and community assembly processes in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, employing field studies, laboratory experiments, and computational simulations. Notable publications include "Diversity–stability relationships across organism groups and ecosystem types become decoupled across spatial scales: a synthesis of organism and ecosystem types" in Ecology (2023), "Scaling up and down: movement ecology for microorganisms" in Trends in Microbiology (2023), "Seed banks alter metacommunity diversity: the interactive effects of competition, dispersal, and dormancy" in Ecology Letters (2022), and "Dormancy in metacommunities" in The American Naturalist (2019). As principal investigator, he secured a $614,757 grant from the Mississippi Based RESTORE Act Center of Excellence for the project "Transport and fate of bacterial communities in Mississippi coastal ecosystems" (2023–2025). Additional funding includes a $65,888 Wyoming EPSCoR grant as PI (2021–2022) and co-PI role on a $76,000 NSF LTER synthesis project (2016–2018). His honors encompass the Downer Undergraduate Research Award First Place Mentor Award (2024), Louise Constable Hoover Fellowship ($2,000, 2019), and George W. Brackenridge Fellowship ($2,000, 2017). Wisnoski contributes to departmental committees at Mississippi State University, including the Graduate Committee (2024–present) and Faculty Search Committee (2023–2024), and serves as a peer reviewer for journals such as Ecology Letters, Ecology, and The ISME Journal.