Ernesto Viveiros de Castro
Ph.D. student in Interdisciplinary Ecology, School of Natural Resources and Environment; M.S. in Ecology and B.Sc. in Biology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Ernesto is a biologist from Brazil who has been working in Protected Areas Management for 17 years. Currently he mantains his work as an environmental analyst and researcher at ICMBio (Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade), the agency that manages Brazilian Federal Protected Areas. Prior to coming to UF Ernesto was Manager of the Serra dos Órgãos National Park (2004-2011), General Coordinator of Public Use at ICMBio (2011-2012) and Manager of the Tijuca National Park (2012-2018). He is also a member of World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA-IUCN) and the Tourism and Protected Areas Specialist Group (TAPAS-IUCN). Ernesto got his M.S. degree studying differential extinction vulnerabilities of small mammals in fragmented landscapes in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. As a park manager Ernesto conducted research on nature-based tourism, as well as animal reintroductions, and invasive species. As a Ph.D. student he is studying the contribution of long-distance trails to nature conservation, addressing ecological, economic and social aspects.
Ernesto is funded by the Brazilian Government, and TCD and SNRE at UF.
Ana María Garrido Corredor
Ph.D. student in the Anthropology Department; M.Sc. in Environmental Anthropology at the University of Kent, United Kingdom; B.A. in Anthropology and B.Sc. in Biology from Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia.
Ana María is a TCD member and a Ph.D. Anthropology student working with Dr. Catherine Tucker. For the past eight years, she has been working on various projects concerning socio-environmental conflicts, resource governance, and community-based conservation. Her research has focused on understanding the impacts of extractive economies, particularly gold mining, on the livelihoods of afro-descendant communities inhabiting the Pacific Region of Colombia. Additionally, during the last three years, she has been working in the Science-Policy interphase in Colombia, designing and implementing environmental policies to strengthen local initiatives for the sustainable management of natural resources. From these experiences, she developed her current research interests, which focus on understanding how global conservation agendas, coupled with national and international economic processes, intersect with the everyday politics of resource management and use and shape the cultural and symbolic meaning of human-forest interactions. Ana María is interested in conducting interdisciplinary research, combining qualitative methods such as participant observation and interviews, and methodologies of economic botany, mainly ethnobotanical inventories, as complementary ways of understanding the relationship between plants and people in agroforest landscapes.
Ana María is funded by the Anthropology Department and the TCD Program
Priyanka Hari Haran
Ph.D. student in Interdisciplinary Ecology, the School of Natural Resources and Environment, with a focus on Wildlife Ecology and Conservation; M.S. in Ecology and Environmental Sciences from Pondicherry University, India; B.Sc. in Zoology from the University of Madras, India.
Priyanka is writer and ecologist who sometimes studies birds in beautiful places. For her master’s thesis, she looked at the habitat use of mixed-species flocks of birds in an evergreen forest in the Western Ghats mountain range of India. She then worked with a conservation NGO, the Nature Conservation Foundation, to understand how rainforest birds respond to the ecological restoration of forests in this landscape for her Ph.D. dissertation research, Priyanka will go back to these forests to examine how bird communities fare in restored and degraded forest fragments. In the past, she has written for Mongabay-India, Yale e360, and several Indian publications; Priyanka also served as editorial assistant for a Government of India publication on the effects of climate change on Indian biodiversity.
Priyanka is jointly funded by the TCD program, the School of Natural Resources and Environment, and the Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation at UF.
Diego Juarez-Sanchez
Ph.D. student in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation; M.Sc. in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation from the University of Florida; Lic. In Biology from the historic Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala (USAC).
Diego is interested in predator-prey interactions, trophic ecology, and invasion ecology. His experience has focused on ecology of predators, especially mammalian carnivores. He has worked as a researcher for Guatemalan agencies, such as the National Organization for the Conservation and the Environment (ONCA) and USAC, among others. As a follow up on his research on neotropical river otters, Diego has expanded to study the guild of predators in riverine systems, including large fish, crocodiles, fishing birds, and river otters. In particular, he examines and how these predators interact with their prey and their environment. In his dissertation, Diego will be evaluating if the diversity of native river predators is a leading driver of invasive fish populations. Local artisanal fisherpersons share the fishing resources with native river predators. This situation can lead to coexistence or conflict depending on the human perceptions of the native predators. By being part of the TCD program, Diego hopes to learn the skills and tools to understand and promote the coexistence of humans and predators in a complex system like the Usumacinta River basin in northern Guatemala.
Diego is funded by the Wildlife Ecology and Conservation Department, the TCD, and a project by United States Geological Survey (USGS).
Vanessa Luna
Ph.D. student in Interdisciplinary Ecology, School of Natural Resources and Environment; M.S. in Latin America Studies from the University of Florida; B.S. in Biology from the Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina, Peru.
Vanessa has experience working with ecological and conservation projects in the Peruvian Amazon as a science coordinator of two biological stations in Manu National Park. In this position she promoted information sharing of scientific data among park rangers, indigenous conservationists, government environmental regulators, among others. For her Masters’ degree at UF, she evaluated the effectiveness of communal conservation areas in Peruvian Amazon. By being part of the TCD program, Vanessa hopes to gain tools and skills related to the creation of regional and international alliances for the conservation of natural areas in the Amazon. She is also interested in the promotion of spaces where strategies that resulted in successful conservation efforts are shared. Vanessa was a major contributor to TCD’s Governance of Infrastructure in the Amazon project (GIA) . For her dissertation research, Vanessa is exploring fire governance in rural communities of the Peruvian Andes.
Vanessa is jointly funded by TCD Program and the UF School of Natural Resources and Environment, and by a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to TCD for the GIA project.
Pamela Montero-Alvarez
Ph.D. candidate in Interdisciplinary Ecology, School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE); Graduate Diploma in Amazonian Studies from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru; B.S. in Biological Sciences from the National University of the Peruvian Amazon, Peru.
Pamela is a Peruvian biologist with experience in protected areas and community-based management of natural resources, planning and participatory tools for rural diagnosis. She has professional experience as a Specialist on Governance for the Regional Office of Loreto for “Peru Bosques” – a USAID/Peru Project, and later served as Specialist on Natural Protected Areas for the same project. Previous professional experiences include Director of Natural Resources of the Municipality of “Datem del Maranon”, Loreto-Peru, Community Management Specialist at the Regional Project for Conservation in Loreto (Maijuna Native Community Proposal and Tamshiyacu Tahuayo Protected Area). In 2018 she received a Small Grant from Rufford Foundation to conduct a camara trap project to enhance community-based conservation strategies in the Peruvian Amazon. Pamela identifies her research interests to include social networks, conservation strategies linked to sustainable development, and community-based tourism. Pamela recently led a mentorship initiative called: Academic Mentorship to Promote a Better and Greater Participation from Students from Peruvian Amazonian Universities; this initiative was conducted along other TCD-alumni: Farah Carrasco, Ph.D.; Tania Romero, M.S.; and Angelica Garcia, Ph.D.; along with TCD faculty Robert Buschbacher. Currently Pmela collaborates with the TREE Foundation as an environmental educator for the Amazon Canopy Walkway Project.
Pamela is funded by Fulbright-LASPAU, TCD, UFBI and SNRE at UF, and through a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to TCD for the GIA project.
Meshach Pierre
M.A. student in Criminology, Law and Society, Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law; Pg.Dip. in International Wildlife Conservation Practice from the University of Oxford; B.S. in Biology from the University of Guyana (Georgetown-Guyana).
Meshach has experience working with a variety of ecological and conservation projects in both Guyana and Suriname, especially focused on birds and large mammals. He was the 2014-2015 Panthera Winston Cobb Fellow, under which he studied large mammals in a logging concession with mixed land use. In 2018 he was awarded the Recanati-Kaplan scholarship to attend the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit’s (WildCRU) Postgraduate Diploma at the University of Oxford. There he studied human-black caiman conflict in villages in the Rupununi region of Guyana. Working in the field has taught him the value of indigenous community participation in the success of conservation programs. Meshach’s current research is examining the human dimensions of human-jaguar conflict in the Rupununi, using the interdisciplinary conservation criminology framework, a toolkit that draws from natural resources management, risk science, and criminology. His aim is to understand the factors that affect risk perceptions and tolerance of jaguars, and the potential role that community members may play in preventing jaguar killing.
Meshach Pierre is funded by the TCD program and Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law at UF.
Christian Rivera
Ph.D. Candidate in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation; M.A. in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology from Columbia University, NY; B.A. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University, NJ.
Christian is a Costa Rican-American conservation scientist/biologist interested in research on biodiversity conservation; analysis of social-ecological systems; and biocultural diversity and conservation. His current research focuses on integrating approaches in ecology, anthropology, and conservation criminology to analyze wildlife hunting and trade, with a focus on the sustainable management of shared human-primate systems across the tropics. Past projects include multidisciplinary analysis of turtle trade in the Peruvian Amazon; exploitation of endangered mammals in the U.S.; and viability analyses of hunted mammals in Costa Rica. Throughout his master’s studies, Christian held a research assistantship at the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History, where he assisted with projects focused on the conservation of biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity. Prior to his graduate studies, Christian served as a Research and Training Associate for the Center for People and Forests (Bangkok, Thailand) and as a “Campus-as-Lab Program” Development Coordinator at Princeton University’s Office of Sustainability. Christian has field experience in the Southeast Asian and New World tropics, and is a member of the global Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity Committee of the Society for Conservation Biology.
Christian is funded by the TCD Program and the Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation at UF.
Viviana (Vivi) Rojas Bonzi
Ph.D. student at the Wildlife Ecology and Conservation Department; MSc in Interdisciplinary Ecology, School of Natural Resources and Environment and B.Sc. in Biology from the Universidad Nacional de Asuncion, Paraguay.
Viviana (Vivi) is a biologist from Paraguay who graduated from the Universidad Nacional de Asunción. Vivi was awarded with the Fulbright scholarship to pursue a Master’s degree in the Molecular Ecology Lab at University of Florida working with Dr James Austin. Her Masters research focused on small mammal (rodent) dispersal in sub-saharan Africa, where she worked in Swaziland at the Savannah Research Centre. Vivi returned to her country and worked in several conservation projects led by a national NGO and soon after she became the Species Conservation Program Coordinator. Now, she is pursuing her PhD in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation with a concentration in Tropical Conservation and Development. She is now looking forward to incorporating more interdisciplinary approaches to link her research to conservation practice and decision making. She will be working in the Paraguayan Chaco forest, a deforestation hot spot, looking to better understand medium and large mammal communities and how they respond to the current and major threats of this human-wildlife system.
Vivi is funded by the BECAL scholarship (Government of Paraguay), the WEC department and the TCD at UF.