University of California, Los Angeles

Faculty Member, Geography

Assistant Professor

About

My research is in ecosystem science and tropical ecology, with an emphasis on biogeographic gradients and global change factors. I focus on drivers of plant-soil-microbe processes and carbon storage with changes in climate and nutrient availability (e.g. nitrogen deposition, warming, and fire regime). In addition to altering plant productivity and carbon inputs to soils, global change can directly alter soil carbon storage via changes in microbial activity, decomposition, and soil chemical properties. My current projects are: 1) biogeochemical impacts of urbanization in Latin American watersheds; 2) long-term soil carbon storage across climate and soil weathering gradients in Hawai’i; 3) effects of charcoal on plant-soil-microbe interactions in fire-prone California grasslands.

Other areas of interest include changes in above- and belowground carbon sequestration with reforestation, understory plant recruitment in tropical plantations, and biological nitrogen fixation in nitrogen-rich ecosystems.

I am currently accepting graduate students to start in the fall of 2012 with interests in ecosystem science and biogeochemistry in the tropics and California. For more information please email me with your CV.

Contact Information