Patricia A. Soranno

Dr. Patricia Soranno is the co-director of the Bridge Lab in the Department of Integrative Biology and the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife and is a member of the Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior Program at MSU. From 2019-2023, she also served as Division Director of the Division of Biological Infrastructure in the Directorate for Biological Sciences at the U.S. National Science Foundation. As co-lead of the LAGOS project, she drives the development of tools and approaches for studying freshwater at macroscales to address environmental grand challenges and inform management and policy. She is the founding editor-in-chief of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography’s open-access journal, Limnology & Oceanography Letters. She is also a Senior Fellow for Research Infrastructure at MSU’s Office of Research & Innovation.

Inclusive leadership

Patricia is an inclusive and strategic leader, fostering environments where both people and ideas thrive. Her broad-ranging experience includes leading large interdisciplinary research teams at universities, launching a new open-access disciplinary journal, and directing a division of research infrastructure at a national funding agency. She envisions a future STEM enterprise that better reflects the realities of contemporary science that is inclusive and equitable in all its practices and values, is highly collaborative and team-based, is often data-intensive and interdisciplinary, and places the highest value in not only gaining fundamental knowledge, but also in its application and translation to societal problems and needs. To aid other researchers in leading research teams, she and her collaborators have published on creating and maintaining high-performing collaborative research teams, improving the culture of collaboration, and strategies for effective collaborative manuscript development.

Disciplinary expertise

As a macrosystems ecologist, Patricia develops concepts, approaches, and research platforms to advance data-intensive ecology. She has also helped lead the development of landscape limnology – the study of the multi-scaled spatial and temporal drivers of aquatic chemistry and biology. She and her collaborators have spent decades conducting research on lakes at the necessary regional and macroscales to better understand how ecological systems will respond to global changes. Her research, all of which is collaborative, crosses disciplinary boundaries to solve complex problems, using team science, open science, and data-intensive approaches, including how those approaches are needed to advance ecological science.

Advancing open science and scientific publishing

Patricia champions inclusivity and open science through innovative strategies that engage a broader range of individuals in scientific publishing through open-access journals, early-career publishing fellowship programs, analyses of people engaged in editing, and recommendations for impactful reviews. She has also published numerous articles to aid researchers in making their research more freely accessible, such as 6 simple steps to share your data when publishing, the ethics of data sharing in environmental science, and approaches to foster data reuse.