Erin Maybach, Post-Baccalaureate '23, current PhD Student in Dept. Earth and Environmental Science at Columbia | As a member of the Naeem-Palmer Ecology With No Apology Lab Group, Erin was interested in the genetic diversity of marine microbes. Specifically her research investigated the role of chemical environments shaping pan-genomes of marine cyanobacteria. Currently she is a Ph.D. student in Columbia's department of Earth and Environmental Sciences where she is advised by Sonya Dyhrman. She is also a member of the NSF Science and Technology Center for Chemical Currencies for a Microbial Planet (C-CoMP), and creator of BioInform, a collaboration and STEM education platform for bioinformatics. [CV 2024]
Krishna Anujan, PhD '22| My broad research interests are in the biodiversity and ecosystem functioning of tropical forests. For my PhD, I study the role of trophic interactions in productivity and decomposition, focussing on communities of tropical forest seedlings and their insect herbivores. I intend to integrate a functional trait based understanding of the interactions as well as the landscape context in order to predict spatial variation in productivity and decomposition. Much of the work will be carried out in the Andaman Islands, an archipelago of continental islands in the Bay of Bengal.
Before starting my PhD, I worked as a field coordinator for the Long Term Ecosystem Monitoring Network (LEMoN-India), managing two forest dynamics plots. I completed my Integrated BS-MS at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune (IISER-P). For my masters’ thesis, I worked on the effects of introduced spotted deer on tree communities in the Andaman Islands advised by Dr. Jayashree Ratnam and Dr. Mahesh Sankaran. Besides research, I am also involved in ecology outreach and science communication.
Read more about Krishna's work at krishnaanujan.weebly.com.
Roni Friedman, MA '22 | For my master's thesis I developed and managed a research project that studied the impact of thermal heterogeneity on the survival and development of Atlantic Horseshoe Crab embryos. This research provides valuable and new insight on how American horseshoe crabs are being impacted by climate change, and shows evidence that temperature changes are contributing to their population decline.
Sebastian Heilpern, PhD '20| My PhD research broadly examines the causes and consequences of biodiversity loss on ecosystem functions and services. For my dissertation I am focused on quantifying and predicting ecosystem vulnerability using traits, and understanding the implications of changing fish biodiversity on food security in the Peruvian Amazon.
I received a M.S. from the University of Chicago (advised by Tim Wootton), where I investigated how the interactions between fishes and large woody debris influenced primary and secondary productivity in the Manu River, a large Amazonian floodplain river system in Southeastern Peru. Prior to that, I was the Program Officer for the Latin American and Caribbean Program at the Wildlife Conservation Society, and completed my undergraduate degree at Cornell University
Anouch Missirian (PhD '20, Sustainable Development) seeks to address environmental issues through an interdisciplinary approach, combining questions, methods, and data from both ecology and economics. She is currently an assistant professor at the Toulouse School of Economics.
Read more about Anouch's work at anouchmissirian.com.
Beryl Kahn, MA '20 | My interest is in urban marine ecosystems and aquatic restoration ecology. My thesis work centered around genomic variation and plastic response to environmental stressors in oysters. I compared gene expression levels of heavy metal-tolerance loci in oyster populations across the Eastern Seaboard, to possibly find evidence of local adaptation to polluted systems. I aim to use this research to strengthen the case for building shoreline resilience and restoring marine biodiversity around coastal cities. Before starting at E3B, I worked in the nonprofit sector as a STEM educator and restoration ecologist at Randall’s Island Park in New York City.
Anand Osuri (Post-doc '19) is fascinated by different kinds of natural ecosystems and cares deeply about their conservation. His research focuses on tropical forest ecology, with particular emphasis on understanding how anthropogenic disturbances such as forest fragmentation affect biodiversity, ecological processes and ecosystem services. He also works with restoration practitioners to examine the factors governing ecological recovery in forests that have been restored. His current project asks whether tree diversity promotes stability of terrestrial carbon sequestration across a range of tropical forests and plantations, and he addresses this question using a combination of field surveys and time-series satellite data analysis.
Amrita Neelakantan, PhD '18, Post-doc '19 | My PhD covered the resettlement of people from a national park in India. My research focuses on food security, livelihood strategies and impacts on natural resources once forest dwellers have relocated outside protected areas. My study is based around Kanha national park in the central Indian highlands and was featured on the Earth Institute blog. I am a core organizer in the Network for Conserving Central India.
Neha Savant, MA '18 | I am broadly interested in how organisms respond to landscape patterns and how understanding these responses can help inform conservation action. For my master's thesis, I worked with the New Jersey Conservation Foundation (NJCF) to understand how genomic connectivity of the state-threatened long-tail salamander varies across stream and pond habitats in northern New Jersey. NJCF is currently working with the Eastern Environmental Law Center to use this research to build a case against a proposed natural gas pipeline across the salamanders' habitat.
Brian Weeks, PhD '17| My research is focused on the birds of the Solomon Islands, and integrates field biology, molecular phylogenetics, and collections-based comparative morphology. I am interested in understanding the processes that have generated diversity, and whether or not different histories of community assembly have persistent effects on contemporary community ecology.
Read more about Brian's work at seas.umich.edu.
Case Prager, MA '11, PhD '17 | I am broadly interested in the ecological consequences of declining biological diversity, and how multiple dimensions of diversity drive ecosystem-level processes, such as carbon cycling. I examine these relationships in the Arctic where rapid warming is leading to significant shifts in the structure and functioning of communities and ecosystems.
Sylvia Wood, Post-doc '16 | My research interests arise from the recognition that the livelihoods of millions of people are intimately dependent on human-managed landscapes and the ecosystem services they provide. Human land-use can result in the creation of highly persistent changes to the structure and ecological function of affected landscapes which can last for decades to millennia. Although many ecologists are now re-examining modern landscapes in the context of environmental history, few consider how modern land-use practices may be creating new legacies and their implications for type and quality of resources available in the future.
This understanding of human-environment relationships is in agricultural landscapes is particularly relevant as the world begins designing the next phase of Sustainable Development Goals which will guide the global development agenda for the coming decades. People often assume that there is always a strong trade-off between agriculture and biodiversity conservation agendas. My work focuses on bringing forth ecological understandings of the mutually beneficial relationships that can be had by integrating conservation and agricultural management practices to support healthy, vibrant agroecosystems and landscapes.
Eric Yee, MA '16 | I am interested in plant functional traits, physiology, and temporal dynamics of plant communities. My current project is on variation of plant communities atop New York City green roofs across the growing season. In addition, my field work has shown that there is a strong negative relationship between my personal well-being and time spent in the field (p<0.05).
Stephen Wood, PhD '15 | Steve was a student co-advised by Shahid Naeem and Cheryl Palm and supported by the NSF PIRE grant between Columbia University, Brown University, and Woods Hole. His work was on microbial biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in smallholder, Sub-Saharan rural farms, with field studies in Kenya which was part of the Earth Institute Millennium Village project.
Steve is now a NatureNet Science Fellow at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He is working with The Nature Conservancy and Bioversity International to understand how emerging paradigms of soil organic matter formation can be used to develop new approaches to sustainable agriculture.
Vivian Valencia (PhD '15) is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Agroecology and Food System Sustainability at the University of Michigan. Her current work investigates the nexus between agriculture and nutrition for the family farming sector in Brazil. Vivian's career goal is to develop the scientific underpinnings for sustainable agricultural systems that address the need for providing nutritious food with conserving the ecosystem services and biodiversity resources upon which they depend.Vivian defended her dissertation in May 2015. For her dissertation research, she integrated methods and theories from the natural and social sciences to investigate farmers' decision-making and the consequences for biodiversity conservation among smallscale shade coffee farmers in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. She examined patterns of tree species diversity and community composition in coffee agroforestry systems and uncovered the social drivers related to farmers’ decision-making and ecological processes giving rise to those patterns. Vivian was co-advised by Shahid Naeem and Paige West; her committee members included Ruth DeFries, Eleanor Sterling (AMNH), and Luis García-Barrios (ECOSUR).
Heidi Cunnick, MA '15 | I am interested in how environmental factors influence plant life history strategies and population dynamics. My study system is an endangered, early successional, wetland sedge species (Rhynchospora knieskernii) endemic to the New Jersey Pine Barrens; and by extension the rare associated plants with which it is found.
Jess Gersony, BA '15 | Generally, I am interested in vegetation-climate interactions and the impact of global change on plant physiology and ecology. My research in the Naeem-Palmer Lab Group focused on the thermal ecology (relationships between plant biology and the thermal environment) of arctic tundra vegetation, as well as the thermal ecology of native vegetation communities and Sedum communities on green roofs in NYC. We used a hand-held infrared camera (Shirley), drones (Stallone, Tyrone and Ramone), a boom (boomer), and a children's jungle gym (Thermodome) to investigate these areas. I am now a PhD student at Harvard University advised by Dr. Noel Michele Holbrook exploring questions related to plant hydraulics and climate change.
Meha Jain, PhD '14 | My research broadly examines the impacts of environmental change on agricultural production, and strategies that farmers may adopt to reduce negative impacts. I do this by combining remote sensing and geospatial analyses with household-level and census datasets to examine farmer decision-making and behavior across large spatial and temporal scales. To date my work has focused on the impacts of weather variability and groundwater depletion on agricultural production in India, and whether farmers are able to adapt their cropping practices to mitigate these impacts.
I am an NSF SEES Postdoctoral Fellow in the lab of David Lobell in the Department of Earth System Science at Stanford University. I am excited to be joining the Sustainable Food Systems Initiative and the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan as an Assistant Professor in Fall of 2016.
Dan Flynn (PhD '11) is an Environmental Biologist at the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center in Cambridge, MA. His current work focuses on energy, environment, and sustainability research projects for federal agencies. His portfolio ranges from evaluating environmental consequences of biofuels, to facilitating Endangered Species Act coordination between agencies, to research on the intersection between energy systems and infrastructure. His previous work focused on biodiversity, ecosystem processes, and global change. Following his time in the Naeem lab, he carried out postdoctoral research at the University of Zurich and Harvard University.
Farshid Ahrestani works as a research scientist at Penn State on topics that range from controlling nuisance bears in Pennsylvania, to predicting the spread of chronic wasting disease in white-tailed deer in eastern US. While he was at Columbia he coordinated TraitNet, a NSF Research Coordination Network focused on facilitating trait-based research.
Farshid has studied terrestrial large herbivores for over two decades and is the lead editor of a volume titled "The ecology of large herbivores in South and Southeast Asia" published as part of Springer’s Ecological Studies Series. Farshid worked with the WCS-India program as a Fulbright Scholar in India, 2016-17, and coordinates conservation and research in the Palani Hills, southern India, not too far from where he grew up. Farshid completed his PhD from Wageningen University, Netherlands, and has been a software programmer on Wall Street, a knowledge content manager at UNDP, a high school mathematics teacher, and a radio DJ of reggae music.
Read more about Farshid's work at farshid-ahrestani.weebly.com.
Suzanne Lipton | I have a Master’s in Public Administration in Environmental Science and Policy from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (2014) and participate in the Naeem-Palmer Lab Group as the Assistant Director of the Earth Institute Center for Environmental Sustainability (EICES).
I am broadly interested in the impacts of agricultural production on ecosystem function and the potential for agroecological management to mitigate this impact while producing adequate food for an expected population of 10 billion people by 2050. I am especially interested in this in the context of the impact of various agricultural management practices on biodiversity, and on the spectrum of food production under land sparing or land sharing models.
I am also interested in the effects of transitioning conventionally managed agroecosystems (i.e. pesticide and synthetic fertilizer) to agroecological management (i.e. lack of synthetic inputs, crop rotation, cover cropping), the ways in which biodiversity can improve agroecosystem functioning, and the potential to simultaneously preserve biodiversity and increase crop production through increases in ecosystem functioning.
While my focus is in the ecology of agroecosystems, I am also interested in the social and economic motivators for various management practices and ways in which appropriate policies can provide positive influences.
Currently, I am exploring these interests with a project that uses UAVs to map the NDVI of agroecosystems that are transitioning from conventional management to agroecological management in New York State.
In my role as Assistant Director at EICES, I manage a program of immersive summer field based classes for undergraduates that provide an introduction to ecology and environment in Jordan, Brazil, and New York. I am heavily involved in the development and running one of the New York based course, which uses the agroecosystems of NYC, NYS and the surrounding area to teach students about the ecology of agrifood systems in the Northeast and globally. In this course, I teach students ecological field and lab methods, such as using the Berlese funnels to extract soil arthropods from soil samples, and using a mobile soil testing kit developed by the Earth Institute (the Soil Doc Kit).
Before starting my graduate program, I worked as a pastry chef at farm-to-table restaurants and various nonprofits focused on environment and food systems.