Principal Investigator
Dr. Liza S. ComitaLiza 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.
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Graduate Students
Harikrishnan Venugopalan Nair Radhamoni
Megan Sullivan
Akshay Surendra
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Postdoctoral Researchers
Dr. Luke Browne
Dr. Sergio Villegas Estrada
Dr. Michelle Spicer
Dr. Jason Vleminckx
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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.
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