2024-2025 Fellows

Research Interests: Compliance and non-compliance with wildlife conservation strategies, community-based conservation, environmental governance, behavior change for wildlife conservation, conservation planning

Website URL (personal research or group if available):

1. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=WPi9cc4AAAAJ&hl=es
2. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hernan-Alvarez-5

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I am a Ph.D. candidate in Ana Longo’s lab, aiming to become an integrative ecologist by combining disciplines and scales (i.e., individuals to communities) to understand hosts’ immune responses across ontogeny, seasons, and their interactions with the microbiome. Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) is a pathogenic skin fungus responsible for amphibian declines globally, but not all species succumb to the infection. Disentangling how host-pathogen interactions drive community dynamics after pathogen emergence will require integrating the diversity of reproductive modes, microhabitats, and immune responses with the environmental challenges imposed by climate change. In my dissertation, I integrate empirical data from the field and laboratory experiments to understand the host-pathogen-microbiome dynamics in the context of the emergent pathogenic chytrid fungus Bd that causes chytridiomycosis. I am focused on energy allocation tradeoffs between immune defenses and energy-demanding processes like juvenile growth and adult reproduction. However, host immunity in amphibians is a complex trait influenced by seasonality, ontogeny, and the biotic interaction with their skin microbiome. By integrating behavior, physiology, immunology, and microbiology disciplines, I aim to disentangle the drivers of host-pathogen dynamics and their effects on fitness in a novel way. The results of my work will serve as a baseline to quantify pathogen pressures in other terrestrial direct-developer species in Central and South America, and the Caribbean. The synergy between climate change and Bd has already been responsible for the extinction of terrestrial species in the Caribbean, and we predict more declines because regions with high endemism overlap with the fundamental niche of Bd. My findings will reveal host traits related to persistence and how fitness costs can constrain the pace of amphibian species recovery despite survival.

For more information, visit https://thelongolab.com.

My interests center around avian community ecology: determining how environmental factors shape which groups of bird species live together across time and space. I work in a seasonally flooded forest landscape of western Amazonia, northeast Peru. Using passive acoustic monitoring and machine learning, I am examining how this dramatic seasonality shapes bird communities. Do all the terrestrial birds leave? Do birds of the shaded understory remain in place as floodwaters rise? What variation is there in these patterns? Do small patches of unflooded forest act as island refugia for some birds during flooded months?

Since starting my thesis, seasonal flooding in South America has been much lower than average, with large parts of the Amazon experiencing historic drought conditions. My research could therefore shed light on how bird communities in these forests are starting to shift in response to climate change. As a UFBI Fellow, I’ll be training automatic classification algorithms to detect bird species across different functional groups in the ~3 million minutes of audio data I’ve collected so far!

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My research interests lie at the interface of avian ecology and conservation biology, with a particular focus on the movement patterns and origins of migratory birds along the Atlantic Flyway and the western United States. I use intrinsic markers including stable isotopes to investigate how environmental factors like habitat and precipitation influence bird migration, molt, and diet. I hold a B.Sc. in Biology from the Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Abad in Peru and an M.S. from the University of Florida.

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I am a Ph.D. candidate in Wildlife Ecology & Conservation. 

My research interests are mammals, coupled human-wildlife systems, conservation, ecology, dry forests.

For more about my lab, visit http://www.globalhumanwildlifelab.com/.

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I am a third-year graduate student in the Department of Biology, working with Dr. Juannan Zhou. My research interests lie on the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and biology, particularly in training language models to understand the “language” of proteins and DNA. I am interested in developing explainable AI models for proteins and exploring generative AI to design novel genetic constructs, such as biosynthetic gene clusters. Additionally, I aim to create tools for large-scale bioinformatics pipelines.

At the Zhou Lab, my work focuses on developing models that map genotype-phenotype relationships across molecules, species, and interspecies interactions. As a UFBI fellow, I am investigating microbial diversity and microbiome community dynamics by building large language models to capture species interactions.

Before graduate school, I led a machine learning team at Reliance Jio, India, where I developed algorithms and digital twins for optimizing oil refinery product feeds. I hold a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering and a Master’s Degree in Biological Sciences from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India.

For more information, visit  https://www.linkedin.com/in/palash-sethi/ and https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=MzpIU5kAAAAJ

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Dept. of Biology and the Florida Museum of Natural History. 

My research interests are floral evolution and development; Comparative Morphology; CT scanning; Art/Science.

For more about my studies, visit https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/soltis-lab/people/graduate-students/.

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I have been fascinated by birds and natural history since the first time I picked up a pair of binoculars and stepped out on a trail. I’m particularly interested in the diversity of species and ecological interactions in tropical ecosystems. My previous work as a master’s student focused on the conservation biology of birds in the Caribbean, specifically the endangered Bahama Oriole. I have also participated in international fieldwork on conservation projects in Java, Indonesia and Mauritius. I am currently a PhD candidate in the lab of Dr. Bette Loiselle, where my research interests range from conservation biology to behavioral ecology. My dissertation research focuses on the behavioral ecology of the Palmchat (Dulus dominicus), a highly social, communally nesting bird species that is endemic to the Dominican Republic and Haiti. I am studying cooperative nesting behavior in Palmchats to understand how roles and responsibilities are divided between group members in this complex animal society, and to understand how individual relationships form within large social groups. I am also investigating questions about the evolution of colonial nesting across the avian tree of life. By studying palmchats, I hope to uncover the biology of this unique and little-known species, as well as to better understand why it has evolved such a complex social system.

For pictures of my studies visit Rickstanleyphotography.com.