Erik Iverson is a UT Austin PhD student studying the genetics of adaptation to climate change. He works in Texas, Mexico, and Peru on organisms including birds and freshwater fishes. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Erik completed his bachelor's and master's degrees at Tulane University in New Orleans. Erik founded the Texas Tropical Network in 2022 with support from the UT Green Fund to help address global conservation and sustainability issues. He serves on the scientific advisory board of the Alliance for a Sustainable Amazon in Puerto Maldonado, Peru, and is the Vice President of the Pines and Prairies Land Trust in Texas.

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Check out Erik's research here.

Dr. Brian Sedio is an assistant professor in UT Austin's Department of Integrative Biology. His research seeks to understand the origins and maintenance of biodiversity in forest communities by integrating perspectives from analytical chemistry, community ecology, macroevolution, historical biogeography, and theoretical ecology. Brian's lab applies cutting-edge techniques in metabolomics to test predictions of fundamental hypotheses regarding the role that plant secondary metabolites play in limiting the host ranges of herbivores and pathogens, essentially defining chemical ‘niches’ that may stabilize competitive coexistence in communities and drive evolutionary lineage diversification in plants.   Much of their work takes place in a network of forest plots maintained by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, as well as the Smithsonian Institution Forest Global Earth Observatory world-wide network of forest dynamics plots.

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Check out Brians bio here.

Maria Jose Gonzalez Becerra is currently pursuing an undergraduate Sustainability studies major in the Natural Resource Management track and a Geography minor at the University of Texas at Austin. She is very interested in consulting, sustainable/environmental policy, and GIS. She is currently involved in the Beevo Beekeeping Society at UT Austin (in the sustainability committee) and has consulting experience through the LIFT sustainability consultant program working with Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages. During Summer 2023, Maria will be working in Botswana applying GIS methods to environmental problems in protected areas.