Rate My Professor Theresa Ong

Theresa Ong is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College, where she serves as an agroecologist combining theoretical and empirical work in agricultural systems. Her research examines complex interactions between the environment, organisms, and people that shape food production and ecosystem stability. Key interests encompass urban agriculture, agroforestry, biological control, critical transition theory, socio-ecological modeling, biocomplexity, and spatio-temporal synchrony. Through the Ong Lab, she investigates agroecological transitions, including biophysical constraints in shifting from degraded soils to sustainable practices. Current projects explore the growth and decline of urban gardens amid socio-economic changes, as well as Chinatowns as resilient alternative food systems, mapping species diversity in trade networks from diversified farms to assess stability against market and environmental stresses. Ong teaches courses such as Agroecology and supports sustainable agriculture initiatives at the Dartmouth Organic Farm.

Ong holds a B.A. from Williams College, an M.S. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Following her doctorate, she was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in the Philpott Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz from 2018 to 2019. In 2021, she received the Ecological Society of America Excellence in Ecology (EEE) Scholars award, part of an initiative to support and elevate diverse early- to mid-career scientists who earned their Ph.D. within the last 20 years. Her influential publications include 'Momentum for agroecology in the USA' (Nature Food, 2024, with Roman-Alcalá et al.); 'Rarity begets rarity: Social and environmental drivers of rare organisms in cities' (Ecological Applications, 2022, with Lin et al.); 'Agroecological transitions: A mathematical perspective on a transdisciplinary problem' (Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 2020, with Liao); 'Ecological complexity and avoiding pest resurgence: intuitions from mathematical ecology' (Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, 2023, with Vandermeer); 'Coupling unstable agents in biological control' (Nature Communications, 2015, with Vandermeer); and 'Antagonism between two natural enemies improves biological control of a coffee pest: The importance of dominance hierarchies' (Biological Control, 2014, with Vandermeer). These works advance understanding of biological control, hysteresis in populations, and urban ecosystem dynamics.