Postdoctoral Fellow, 2012-13

Research Interests

In the broadest sense, my research interests include tropical biodiversity research, ecology, and biogeography, and how these fields can contribute to nature conservation together with other multidisciplinary fields.

Most of my research has focused on tropical parasitic Hymenoptera, more specifically on the Neotropical ichneumonid parasitoid wasps. These wasps play crucial roles in ecosystems functioning as they control population densities of their arthropod hosts. However, the group is very poorly studied, especially in the tropics. I am fascinated by the little-explored tropical rain forest ichneumonid faunas. I am eager to understand how the understudied tropical species will impact the classic assumption of the family’s anomalous latitudinal species richness gradient.

Here at Harvard, my aim is to describe a number of new ichneumonid species that I found in my PhD studies, and to study how these species are distributed in space and time. My collaborators and I have found nearly 200 undescribed species of the ichneumonid subfamily Orthocentrinae in the Central and South American forests. The next step is to give these species names so that they can be taken into account in research and conservation efforts.

Alongside entomological research, I am intrigued by new possibilities for protecting biodiversity. I find psychological research particularly important since the environmental problems are essentially problems in human behavior.