Former Members

POSTDOCS

Debmita Bandyopadhyay

Florian Zellweger

Wang Li

Ruben Valbuena (2016-2018)

Liu Jiajia (2016)

Tommaso Jucker (2015-2016)

Michele Dalponte (2015)

Sabrina Russo (2005-2007)

Raffaele Lafortezza

Georges Kunstler (2003-2005)

Pieter De Frenne

Francisco Rodriguez-Sanchez

Rafi Kent

Yue Bin (2015)

PHD STUDENTS

Alejandro Guizar Coutiño

Kyaw Sein Win Tun (O’Neill)

Juheon Lee: Computer Vision Research Scientist at Shapes AI Inc, California

Beatrice Wedeux: Forest Policy Officer, WWF Belgium

Rebecca Spriggs: Civil servant in Whitehall, London

Beccy Wilebore: James Martin Fellow, Long-Term Ecology Lab, University of Oxford

Jessica Fonseca da Silva

Minerva (Jojo) Singh: research fellow, Imperial College, London

Will Simonson: Senior Programme Officer, Climate Change and Biodiversity Team, UNEP-WCMC

Tommaso Jucker: Team leader, University of Bath

Andrew Tanentzap: University lecturer, University of Cambridge

Nadia Bystriakova: Researcher with the Natural History Museum, London

Warren Bentley ( 2004-2008): retired

Laura Spence: Dean of Academics and Faculty member, Sterling College

David Wright: Senior Research Fellow, School of Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences, University of Belfast

Robert Holdaway: Returned to family winemaking business in Malborough, New Zealand (good on yer mate)

Cristian Echeverria (2003):

Jennie Bee (2001-2005): Medical doctor (GP) in London

Aurora Gaxiola: Faculty, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

MASTERS STUDENTS

Kerry-Lee Jenkins

VISITORS

Juan Pablo Narváez-Gómez

Natalia Vizcaino Palomar

Gaia Vaglio Laurin

SUMMER HELPERS

Jaz Stoddart (2017)

Jonathan Mapelli

Dr Thomas Swinfield

Research Associate I work on tropical forest restoration based jointly between the University of Cambridge – Wolfson College – and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. I use a variety of remote sensing techniques from structure from motion, LiDAR and multi-temporal satellite observations to assess forest condition and how it responds to external…

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Dr Laura Bentley

Former PhD student “I am interested in how we adapt landscapes to our needs, and how we can make those landscapes work for us and the wider environment long-term. Increasing forest cover is widely known to affect carbon storage and biodiversity, but less known are its interactions with hydrology. The Mediterranean is facing increasing climatic…

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Dr Boris Bongalov

Boris works in the hyperdiverse jungles of Southeast Asia where a single hectare can support hundreds of woody plants with about a third of them not found in the adjacent hectare. How different ecological mechanisms interact to maintain this inordinate species richness is yet unknown. Boris uses a range of big data sources including airborne…

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Dr Sacha Khoury

Former PhD Student Sacha is interested in how climate change is affecting Mediterranean forests. She is working on determining Mediterranean forest resilience to drought from space. The first part of her work consists in using the latest cloud-computing infrastructure provided by Google Earth Engine to analyse time series of remote sensing data collected by a…

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Dr Matheus Nunes

Matheus is a postdoctoral researcher in the Earth Change Observation Lab of the University of Helsinki, whose research focuses on understanding what controls the structure and function of plant communities. His work uses remote sensing and field surveys to explore how tropical vegetation responds to global changes. His current project revolves around the use of…

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Dr Ruben Valbuena

Mine is a multidisciplinary research involving a wide range of topics mainly in the fields of Forest Ecology and Remote Sensing, including tree size scaling theories, forest structure, competition and dominance, modelling, fusion of remote sensors and integration of information in forest inventory projects, especially those using lidar. Read More…

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Dr Jonathan Williams

Former PhD student “My research focuses on developing and encouraging the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in aiding tropical rainforest restoration. I am looking at how we can map changes and biomass at the individual tree level. This can then be used to assess site conditions and help guide managers to decide how to…

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Kyaw Sein Win Tun (O’Neill)

Tun (O’Neill) works on (1) Myanmar’s forests’ carbon storage; (2) role of forests in the national economy and socioeconomic development through REDD+; (3) species compositional variations in the forests due to ecological factors. During his first year PhD, he investigated the ecological drivers which affect standing forest carbon stock and tree diversity variations of the…

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Dr Florian Zellweger

Postdoc Florian is broadly interested in using Earth Observation technologies to assess forest ecosystems and the values they provide to humans. His current research is centered around the spatial and temporal dynamics of forest microclimates and how they are affecting biodiversity responses to global change. He uses field-based and remote sensing methods, such as airborne…

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Dr. Liu Jiajia

Jiajia is a visiting postdoc at the lab in 2016. He worked on how habitat fragmentation affects secondary succession of plant communities and forest fragmentation patterns in China under the supervision of David Coomes. He is interested in biodiversity patterns in fragmented landscapes from a trait-based approach. His current research focuses on biodiversity ecosystem-functioning relationships,…

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Mr. Juan Pablo Narváez-Gómez

Visiting Scholar Juan Pablo is a Colombian botanist studying the biogeography of woody climbing plants in Tropical America. In particular, his work aims to find out how climate is related to patterns of distribution and endemism of lianas by using environmental niche modelling and quantitative approaches in biogeography. As a study case, he uses the…

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Lydia Soifer

Mphil student Lydia is interested in how climate change affects the distribution of tropical plant species. She is currently working on integrating LiDAR and microclimate models to produce fine resolution, three-dimensional distribution models for epiphytic bromeliads in Trinidad and to evaluate relationships between microclimates and plant diversity.

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Dr. Alex Guizar-Coutino

PhD student I work on conservation impact evaluation, currently focusing on interventions aimed at reducing deforestation and forest degradation in the tropics.

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Debmita Bandyopadhyay

Postdoc research associate Debmita Bandyopadhyay is a postdoc jointly working in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and the Plant Sciences department with Prof. Carola Schönlieb (from DAMTP) and Prof. David Coomes (in FEC). Her current research in the INTEGRAL project entails the development of machine learning techniques for forest species mapping. The project aims to understand forest health…

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