THOMAS B. SMITH PH.D.
Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Professor, Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and Director of the Center for Tropical Research, Institute of the Environment and Sustainability
Tools and Techniques: genomics, remote sensing, modeling, field work
Website: http://www.environment.ucla.edu/ctr/staff/smith_thomas.htmlhttp://www.environment.ucla.edu/CTR/
Email: tbsmith@ucla.edu
Interests: ecology and predictive modeling of the disease, spillover of disease between animals and humans, evolution in human dominated landscapes, speciation
Personal Statement:
Dr. Thomas Smith is founder and Director of the Center for Tropical Research, Institute of the Environment, and is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA. He has more than 30 years of experience working in the rainforests of Africa, Australia, Latin America, and Hawaii. Dr. Smith oversees a host of research projects and directs the research of a large number of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers on projects based in tropical countries worldwide. In recent years his research has also focused on studying evolution in human-altered environments, the ecology of disease, and developing new approaches for mapping adaptive variation in species to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Dr. Smith holds a B.S. in Natural Sciences and an M.S. in Wildlife Ecology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of California, Berkeley. He has received more than a dozen academic honors for his research, including being a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, the American Ornithologists’ Union, and he was a Senior Fulbright Research Scholar. He is currently a member of the National Geographic Committee for Research and Exploration.