Liza Comita

CV (pdf)

Liza earned a BA in Biology and MA in Conservation Biology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999 and a PhD in Plant Biology from the University of Georgia in 2006. She joined the faculty of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in July 2014. Prior to that she was an assistant professor in the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology at The Ohio State University (2011-2014) and held postdoctoral positions at the University of Minnesota (2006-2007), the Earth Institute at Columbia University (2007-2009), and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (2009-2011). She is broadly interested in the mechanisms driving patterns of diversity, dynamics, and species distributions in both pristine and human-altered systems. Her current research focuses on the ecology of tropical tree species and how spatial and temporal variation in regeneration dynamics act to maintain diversity and determine species abundance and composition within and across plant communities. Her research combines extensive field studies of forest dynamics with cutting-edge statistical techniques, such as maximum likelihood methods, spatially-explicit neighborhood analysis, and hierarchical Bayesian models, to produce novel insights into the processes driving regeneration and structuring diverse ecological communities.