People

Principal Investigator

Dr. Liza S. Comita

Liza is an Associate Professor of Tropical Forest Ecology in the School of the Environment at Yale University, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. She is also a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. She earned a Bachelor's degree in Biology and Master's degree in Conservation Biology from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in Plant Biology from the University of Georgia. She was previously an Assistant Professor in the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology at The Ohio State University and held postdoctoral positions at the University of Minnesota, the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS). As a plant community ecologist, Liza is interested in ecological mechanisms driving patterns of diversity, dynamics, and species distributions in both pristine and human-altered tropical forests.

Graduate Students

Harikrishnan Venugopalan Nair Radhamoni

Hari is a PhD candidate conducting research on how the taxonomic and functional diversity of non-woody (herbaceous) plants vary along gradients of moisture and light in the forests of Western Ghats in India. He has a Bachelor's degree in Agriculture, a Master's degree in Environmental Science, and a diploma in Journalism. Hari previously spent many years working with wildlife conservation projects in the tropics. Currently, he is excited about finding new, efficient methods and protocols to study herbaceous plants and their traits, including field surveys, nursery experiments, and herbarium-based research.

Megan Sullivan

Megan is a 5th year PhD candidate. Her dissertation research focuses on the how selective logging alters regeneration and thereby changes the composition, structure, and function of seedling, sapling, and mature tree communities in the tropical rain forests of Gabon. Megan first started working with the Comita Lab as an undergraduate in 2013. Since then she has worked on plant ecology research in Panama, China, Brazil, and Gabon. Read more about Megan's research here.

Akshay Surendra

Akshay is a PhD student who joined the Comita Lab in Fall 2019. For his dissertation research, he plans to focus on the role of plant-soil feedback in promoting species coexistence and driving species distributions across edaphic gradients in tropical forests. He is interested in testing these questions in mixed dipterocarp forests of Sri Lanka. He has previously studied bird community dynamics in forest fragments, forest recovery from repeat selective-logging, and correlates of human-wildlife conflict around protected areas. Read more about Akshay's research here.

Postdoctoral Researchers

Dr. Luke Browne

Luke received his PhD from Tulane University where he focused on patterns of genetic and species diversity of palm tree communities in Ecuador. Following his PhD, he was a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA working on the genomics of climate adaptation in oak trees. Since joining the Comita Lab in 2019, he has been researching the effects of extreme climate events like El Niño on tropical tree communities across multiple sites in Panama. Read more about Luke's research here.

Dr. Sergio Villegas Estrada

Sergio is a Cullman Postdoctoral Associate in the Comita Lab. He earned his PhD from Marquette University and his MSc from McGill University. His main interest is to understand the underlying mechanisms of ecological succession after farmland abandonment in tropical ecosystems. Sergio uses a community level, multi-taxonomic approach to investigate the simultaneous interplay of various processes (competition, seed dispersal, habitat filtering) to explain how and why communities change over time during succession.

Dr. Michelle Spicer

Michelle's research focuses on drivers of temperate and tropical forest community change. Currently, she is studying the assembly and development of epiphyte communities in Panama and in the Pacific Northwest. She is a postdoctoral scholar funded through a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology. Michelle got her PhD in the Biological Sciences Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Her dissertation research focused on two diverse, yet understudied plant communities: the herbaceous understory layer of the temperate deciduous forest in western Pennsylvania, and vascular epiphytes of tropical cloud forests in Santa Fe National Park in Veraguas, Panama. Read more about Michelle here.

Dr. Jason Vleminckx

Jason is a community ecologist studying the determinants of species assembly in diverse living groups including plants, fungi and invertebrates in Neotropical and Central African forests. After a PhD at the University of Brussels and postdocs at UC Berkeley, CNRS (France) and FIU-Miami, he joined the lab in March 2021 as a YIBS Hutchinson Postdoctoral Fellow to study how Amazonian tree communities respond to inter-annual variation of solar irradiance and rainfall and to disentangle these effects from the influence of directional changes in temperature, cloud cover, and atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Read more about Jason here.

Field Team

Lourdes Hernández Hassán

Lourdes earned an MSc in Global Wildlife Health and Conservation (with Merit) from the University of Bristol (UK) in 2019. Her Masters research focused on temporal and spatial trends in roadkill frequency in Central Panama. Since 2014, Lourdes has worked with Comita Lab members on multiple plant ecology research projects in Panama. She currently oversees data collection and data entry for our long-term study of seedling dynamics at multiple sites along the Panama Canal watershed.