As Director Emeritus of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, a unit of the Smithsonian Institution headquartered in Panama City, Panama, I retired in June, 2020 from the job of managing more than 400 employees, an annual budget of $35 million, and the institute’s research facilities ...
As STRI director for 34 years, a lot of innovative things were enabled under my watch. One of the most important was the addition of the five peninsulas to the Barro Colorado Nature Monument, which created a buffer zone around Barro Colorado Island and added research areas that allow for...
A new collaboration between STRI and the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry will make a research vessel available to researchers, educators and marine policy makers working in the Tropical Eastern Pacific.
We hope to identify the different species of hydromedusae and their relationship with seasonal upwelling in the coastal waters of the Bay of Panama.
As the first marine- and coastal- policy expert to join STRI’s marine staff scientists, Panamanian Ana K. Spalding will work with coastal communities to understand what knowledge is needed to foster wellbeing for both oceans and people.
Multidisciplinary researchers from the global tropics published a new paper suggesting that the key to ocean conservation may lie with the tropical majority.
An innovative mathematical analysis of global coral reef fisheries offers hope for sustainable management of multispecies and artisanal fishing, especially in the global South.
Based on clues ranging from microscopic pollen samples to massive petrified trees and larger-than-life-sized turtle and crocodile fossils, my lab pieces together millions of years of evidence to reconstruct the deep-time history of tropical ecosystems. I help to build international networks of...
I am interested in the evolution and the ecology of marine organisms, particularly sea urchins, but also fishes, crustaceans, and corals. I focus on the processes that give rise to new species, and I use molecular tools to reconstruct the history of populations and of genes. Typically, this...
