AGCI Workshop Participation
Biography
Dr. Helene Muller-Landau is a staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Her research is directed towards understanding the structure and dynamics of plant communities and terrestrial ecosystems, especially of tropical forests. Her group integrates empirical and theoretical approaches to pursue this aim. A major focus of her current research concerns quantifying the carbon budgets of tropical forests, investigating how these respond to environmental variation and depend on plant functional composition, and working to improve the representation of tropical forests in earth system models. She is also particularly interested in understanding the forces shaping the functional composition and diversity of tropical trees and lianas in different conditions. She obtained a BA in Mathematics and Statistics from Swarthmore College, and an MA and PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University. She did postdoctoral work at Princeton and at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. From 2004 to 2007, she was an assistant professor in the department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. In 2008 she moved to her current position at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.