From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 4, October 2021.
José Anibal Medina Vega is a postdoctoral fellow with ForestGEO and NGEE–Tropics working to develop a pantropical analysis of nutrient controls and their impact on tropical tree recruitment, growth, and mortality. He began his fellowship in August 2021. His office is located in the Department of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History. Medina Vega received his B.S. at Pan-American School of Agriculture, Zamorano in Honduras and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Forest and Nature Conservation at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Prior to coming to ForestGEO, he had a postdoctoral fellowship in Stefan Schnitzer’s lab at Marquette University in Wisconsin. Medina Vega collected the data for his doctoral dissertation using canopy cranes of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama from 2015 to 2017.
His current fellowship is to develop a pantropical analysis of nutrient controls on lowland tropical forest structure and functional composition. This analysis will be synthesized into a suite of model testbed sites used to evaluate and benchmark model nutrient cycle representations. Medina Vega will use long-term ForestGEO data coupled with recent detailed soil surveys. For his future research, Medina Vega would like to advance the current knowledge of the mechanisms that regulate the dynamics of natural ecosystems, particularly in the tropical forest biome, by incorporating the study of largely ignored life forms, such as lianas and/or palms, to the already more advanced tree research. He aims to investigate their associations and interactions within each other and with the biome. His hope is that his work can provide a more complete understanding of the dynamics of tropical forest systems.
David Wickell is conducting a 10-week graduate student fellowship in the Department of Botany during the fall of 2021. He is working with Liz Zimmer using genomic methods to elucidate the evolutionary history of allopolyploid speciation in the genus Isoetes. During his time at the Smithsonian Wickell hopes to use Isoetes as a window into how polyploid lineages form and persist within the range of their well-established diploid parents. In addition to his research into polyploidy, Wickell studies the convergent evolution of CAM photosynthesis in Isoetes as part of his doctoral research in Fay-Wei Li’s laboratory at Cornell University. Prior to starting his PhD, he studied asexual biogeography of apomictic ferns with James Beck at Wichita State University where he received his Master’s degree in Biology. Wickell’s current research interests include fern and lycophyte phylogenetics and niche evolution in nascent polyploids.
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