Jordi Bascompte (born in Olot on 20 May 1967) is a professor of ecology at the University of Zurich and the director of its specialized master's program on quantitative environmental sciences.
He grew up in Barcelona and become a keen bird watcher at a relatively young age, mainly due to the influence of a series of TV documentaries by the Spanish Naturalist Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente.
Other scientists who had a strong influence on his work were developmental biologist Pere Alberch (who together with Margalef served in his PhD committee) and Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine, whom he met at a summer school organized by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
[2] Bascompte's research combines theory and the analysis of large data sets to address basic and applied problems in ecology.
[5] This finding helped dismissing the somehow naïve assumption that mutualism has to lead to either highly specialized pairwise interactions or diffuse assemblages intractable to analysis.