Rate My Professor Serguei Saavedra

Serguei Saavedra is an Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he joined as an Assistant Professor in 2016, advancing to Associate Professor without tenure in 2020 and with tenure in 2023. He leads the Systems Ecology Group at MIT and serves as an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute since 2023. A theoretical community ecologist, Saavedra employs complex systems thinking, synthesis, and mathematical modeling rooted in structural stability to investigate the emergent context-dependent behavior of ecological systems, focusing on the feasibility, persistence, and regeneration of multispecies communities under environmental changes.

His academic background includes a Bachelor’s degree in Systems Engineering from Universidad Panamericana, Mexico (1999–2003), a specialization in Mathematical Modeling with Universidad Panamericana and Genoa University, Italy (2003–2004), and a Ph.D. in Engineering Science from Oxford University (2005–2010). Postdoctoral fellowships followed at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (2010–2012), the Integrative Ecology Group at Estación Biológica de Doñana, CSIC, Spain (2012–2014), and Environmental Systems Science at ETH Zurich (2015). Key publications encompass “Rapid monitoring of ecological persistence” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2023), “Ranking species based on sensitivity to perturbations under non-equilibrium community dynamics” (Ecology Letters, 2022), “Multispecies coexistence in fragmented landscapes” (PNAS, 2022), and “A structural approach for understanding multispecies coexistence” (Ecological Monographs, 2017). Saavedra has received prestigious awards including the Career Investigator Award from the American Naturalist Society (2022), Volterra Best Paper Award from the Ecological Society of America (2021), Best Student Paper Award from ESA (2022) and American Naturalist Society (2020), and MIT’s Best Advisee Thesis Award (2019). He is an Editor for Ecology Letters (since 2015) and Chair of the Theoretical Ecology Section of the Ecological Society of America (2022–present).