People

Juan Manuel Cely, MSc student

Juan Manuel is a biologist interested in plant functional ecology. In 2023, he completed his BSc at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, where he assessed functional trait variation at local scales in a Tropical Dry Forest. He is interested in understanding how intraspecific trait variation relates to performance and abundance of seedling tree species.

Tomás Fuentes-Rohwer, PhD candidate

Tomás holds a master’s degree from the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs program and previously served as a lead ecologist at Meristem, LLC in Bloomington, Indiana, where he also completed his BS in Biology. In 2023, he joined our lab with a specific focus on investigating forest recovery following extreme droughts and hurricanes in Puerto Rico.

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Larissa Lotti, PhD student

Larissa is interested in how diversity is maintained in plant communities inside highly diverse systems such as tropical forests. She is also interested in how climate change will impact forest dynamics, especially mortality and recruitment. She completed her BSc in Biology and MSc in Ecology at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, where she worked on the Atlantic Forest, developing an approach to integrate ecology and macroevolution on community assembly.

Manar Talab, MSc student

Manar is a first year masters student in the Frontiers program. She did her bachelors at Princeton University and conducted her thesis on the impacts of mutualism on foundational species recovery with Seagrass and Clams in North Carolina. She is interested in how climate change impacts species interactions and larger ecosystem function. Manar is primarily interested in mutualism, climate change, and habitat restoration.

Peter Williams, Postdoc

Peter is interested in community ecology. As a Ph.D. student, he worked in the tropical forests of Malaysian Borneo, examining the role of seed predators and frugivores on plant communities. As a postdoctoral researcher co-advised by Elise Zipkin and me, he will be working on a project studying tree responses to rainfall variation in tropical dry forests in the neotropics.

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