1. What do you study related to biodiversity (what are your research questions, what organisms do you work on)?
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My Ph.D. research looks at the changing composition of lowland Bolivian forests over the last 50,000 years. I am interested in the response of these tropical forests to glacial climate variability (specifically changes in temperature, rainfall, and carbon dioxide levels). The patterns in the historic response of these tropical plants to these fluctuating climate variables suggest the susceptibility or resilience of different tropical plant groups to a changing climate.
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2. How do you study biodiversity (for example, what technological tools and methodologies do you use in your research)?
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The bulk of my research time is spent counting fossil pollen grains. Fossil pollen provides an approximate “census” of the vegetation composition of a location through time. Pollen samples are extracted from cores of lake sediment using standard palynological laboratory methods—a fairly intensive chemical process. (The cores themselves were collected from Bolivian lakes by Francis Mayle, an advisor at the University of Leicester, UK). Pollen identification is done using light microscopy and by digitally imaging pollen types.
Identifying diversity patterns and their environmental correlates uses multivariate statistical software.
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3. Where do you study biodiversity?
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My thesis research concentrates on Neotropical forests, with some fieldwork experience in Bolivia and Costa Rica. However, I have also worked in the Old World tropics, with a year of fieldwork in the Sinharaja Rainforest, Sri Lanka.
Most of my pollen laboratory work was completed at the University of Leicester, UK and my pollen identification work is done here at FMNH.
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4. How might your research have implications for biological conservation?
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The traditional paradigm of tropical forests has been that they are stable systems. However, there is little empirical evidence that tropical communities have been stable through time. Knowing the recent paleontological history of tropical forests is integral to understanding the long-term stability of tropical systems—i.e. how susceptible these forest communities are to climate fluctuations. Very little is known of the history of tropical forests because the fossil record is so poor. The fossil pollen I work on is a very rare window into the past of the Chiquitano Dry Forest and the adjacent Bolivian moist forests.
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5. How did you become interested in science? What made you want to be a scientist, and how did you get to The Field Museum?
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Scientist and detective are somewhat synonymous in my mind. Paleontology requires reconstructing and understanding the past from a few available clues. Knowing the past is important to my understanding and appreciation of the modern communities. Very little makes sense to me outside the construct of history.
I am a student at the University of Chicago, in the Committee on Evolutionary Biology. The department includes faculty from a number of Chicago institutions, including the Field Museum. My advisor, Jenny McElwain, a paleobotanist, is an assistant curator here at the museum.
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6. Describe important collaborations for your scientific endeavors (describe your work with other researchers, organizations, or scientific groups, local or indigenous peoples, etc.)
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I have a number of committee members both at FMNH and the University of Chicago who have provided invaluable help. My pollen material and help with pollen identification, the foundation of my thesis work, has been provided by Francis Mayle at the University of Leicester, a palynologist specializing in Neotropical pollen.
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