Postdoctoral Researchers
 Liza S. Comita
Liza has a Ph.D. in Plant Biology from the University of Georgia. She is currently Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Earth Institute. She is broadly interested in patterns of diversity, dynamics, and species distributions in both pristine and human-altered tropical forests. Her research focuses on the regeneration ecology of tropical tree species and how spatial and temporal variation in seedling dynamics act to maintain diversity and determine species composition in tropical forests.
Photo: Christian Ziegler, STRI Archives
Charles Yakulic
Ph.D. Students
 Bob Muscarella
Bob has a MS from the University of Miami. His interests include the
role of animals in tropical forest dynamics, specifically through seed
dispersal and successional change. He is developing a dissertation
aimed at addressing the contributions to forest regeneration by
dispersers at multiple spatial scales.
 Marina C. Côrtes
Marina has an M.S. from the State University of São Paulo at Rio Claro.
Her research broadly focuses on animal-plant interactions and its effects on plant recruitment and evolution. For her dissertation research she is 1) assessing spatial and temporal variation in the genetic structure of the Amazonian understory herb Heliconia acuminata in a fragmented landscape in Brazil and 2) performing parentage analyses to decouple pollination and seed dispersal contribution to gene flow in distinct populations of Heliconia acuminata.
 Eli Dueker
Eli is a graduate student in the Deparment of Eath and Environmental Sciences. He is investigating surface water microbial ecology and inter-ecosystem connections with terrestrial systems bordering estuarine and coastal waters. Currently, he is focusing on sites in the Hudson River Estuary, Boothbay Harbor, ME, and the Golfo de Ancud in Southern Chile.
 Meghan M. McGinty
Meghan has an M.S. in Interdisciplinary Ecology from the University of Florida in 2006.
She conducts research on the social and ecological context of native forest tree management in agroforestry systems in tropical biodiversity hotspots.
Her dissertation research focuses on rural farming communities and agroforestry diversity in southern Bahia, Brazil.
Liz Nichols
Liz's interests center on understanding the cascading impacts of biodiversity loss on secondary loss of species and ecosystem function. Her current research focuses on linked community disassembly patterns in mammal and dung beetle assemblages in persistently over-hunted tropical forests.
Lab Associates and Visitors
 Yili Lim
Yili works as a research assistant in the Uriarte Lab. She has a B.A. from University of Chicago and is currently applying to PhD programs for fall 2010. Recently she worked in Puerto Rico in collaboration with lab members to examine the effects of deforestation on water quality and human health. She is interested in studying the impacts human and natural disturbance on changes in lanscape patterns, resilience and stability. She would like to take an interdisciplinary approach in examining her questions and would like to develop a project that incorporates the social, animal, biotic, abiotic, and geographic factors possibly driving landscape changes. However, reality may settle in once graduate school begins.
Patricia Adame
Patricia is visiting research scientist from Spain. She completed her doctorate research at the University of Madrid (Spain), which focused on individual-tree growth modeling of a mediterranean oak using Spanish National Forest Inventory. She is interested in the mathematical modeling process, which integrates theoretical and field ecology concepts and methodologies, and in the ecosystem/human dynamics. Her current work focuses on growth modeling of different species and the abiotic characteristics (topography, basin, etc...) of permanent plots in Puerto Rico between 1990-2000.
 Dan Flynn
Dan's Ph.D. research focuses on understanding the link between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, mainly in the grasslands of northern China. In addition, he has also recently worked on disentangling the effects of land-use history and large-scale disturbance in the secondary forests of Puerto Rico.
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