Principal Investigator
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Dr. Liza S. ComitaLiza is the Davis-Denkmann 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 former 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. As a plant community ecologist, Liza is interested in ecological mechanisms driving patterns of diversity, dynamics, and species distributions in both intact and human-altered tropical forests.
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Graduate Students
Bela Starinchak
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Bela is a PhD student in the lab interested in the resilience of regenerating tropical forests to compounding disturbances, like droughts and fires. She joined in the Fall of 2026. Before that, Bela worked as a Research Associate with Dr. Paulo Brando at Yale where she contributed to a variety of projects investigating forest resilience and post-disturbance recovery in the Brazilian Amazon. She obtained a B.A. from Ohio Wesleyan University in Biology and Spanish Language & Culture, and her M.S. in Biology from James Madison University, for which she studied tree carbon storage and farmer perceptions of ecosystem services in pasture landscapes across Los Santos, Panama and Virginia, U.S.A. Read more about Bela’s work here.
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Shuo Wei
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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 focusing on understanding how phosphorus limitation and typhoon disturbance influence community dynamics in tropical and subtropical forests
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Stanley Tan
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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. For his dissertation research, Stanley is studying the role of plant defenses and immunity against herbivores and pathogens in tropical forests in Malaysia. Read about Stanley's work here.
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Alma Trujillo Miranda
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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.
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Postdoctoral Researchers
Dr. Nohemi Huanca Nunez
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Dr. Anita Weissflog
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Anita joined the Comita lab as a postdoctoral researcher after obtaining her PhD at Bangor University, UK. Using a combination of laboratory and field studies, Anita is working to advance our understanding of how species interactions contribute to shaping patterns of biodiversity and driving ecosystem recovery. Her postdoctoral project focuses on how insect herbivores and fungal pathogens affect seedling dynamics during the natural regeneration of tropical forests in Panama, in collaboration with Dr. Daisy Dent at ETH-Zurich. Read more about Anita here
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Field Team
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Seedling census crew
Luis Aguilar Guillermo Aguilar Roni Saenz Bianco Castro Oldemar Valdes Marlenys Aguilar |
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Lab Alums
Former Graduate Students
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Former Postdocs |
Wildlife Consultants
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