People

Principal Investigator

Dr. Liza S. Comita

Liza is a 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 and co-director of the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture. 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

María Alejandra Gallegos Koyner

María Alejandra joined the lab in the fall of 2024 as a Master of Forest Science student. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Forest Sciences from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, in 2021. Originally from Panama, María is passionate about plant ecology in tropical forests. She has completed internships at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and has experience working in the private sector with a company focused on reforestation using native tree species in Panama.

Shuo Wei

Shuo is interested in forest regeneration and dynamics, applying trait-based ecology to understand how plant communities adapted to chronic environmental stresses in mid-elevation cloud forests, and bridging the gap between forest ecology and silviculture practices. He obtained his Bachelor degree in the Department of Forestry and Resource Conservation in National Taiwan University. Then, he completed his Master’s degree with Prof. David Zelený, during which he studied the early-stage regeneration of Chamaecyparis obtusa var. formosana seedlings in Taiwan (see publication here). Shuo also studied the density-dependence of plant-soil microbe interactions with Prof. Po-Ju Ke. Currently, he is trying to figure out what would be the next topic to go for.

Stanley Tan

Stanley joined the Comita Lab as a PhD student in Fall 2024. He is interested in studying how plant and microbial communities interact to influence the plant diversity and ecology of tropical forests. Prior to Yale, Stanley worked at the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat. He obtained a Bachelor's Degree in Environmental Studies from Yale-NUS College at the National University of Singapore. Read more about Stanley's work 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.

Alma Trujillo Miranda

Alma joined the lab as a PhD student in Fall 2021. She received a Masters of Science degree from Instituto de Ecología A. C. in México, where she conducted research on the effectiveness of active versus passive restoration strategies implemented in tropical montane cloud forest. Alma's Ph.D. dissertation research is focused on understanding how abiotic and biotic factors drive palm regeneration and biodiversity, and how palm functional traits modulate species responses to different types of edge contrast (pasture vs. cacao) in a gradient of landscape forest loss across a human-modified tropical landscape in northwestern Ecuador.

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. Nohemi Huanca Nunez

Nohemi is a YIBS Gaylord Donnelley Postdoctoral Associate in the School of the Environment at Yale University. Her overarching research goal is to explain the ecological processes that shape and promote diversity in old-growth forests and influence the regeneration of human-modified landscapes. Currently, at the Comita Lab, Nohemi focuses on the interaction between above-ground and below-ground functionality and the role of root traits in shaping composition in tree communities recovering from human disturbance in Panama. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, focusing on abiotic and biotic factors shaping seed-rain and seedling establishment in human-modified landscapes in Costa Rica. Read more about Nohemi here.

Dr. Anita Weissflog

Anita investigates how insect herbivores and fungal pathogens affect seedling dynamics during the natural regeneration of tropical forests. Anita has joined the Comita lab as a postdoctoral researcher in fall 2022 after obtaining her PhD at Bangor University, UK. Using a combination of laboratory and field studies in Panama, Anita hopes to advance our understanding of how species interactions contribute to shaping patterns of biodiversity and driving ecosystem recovery. Read more about Anita here