Diana Lucia Gamba
Profile
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Time ZoneCentral
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OrganizationUniversity of Missouri - St. Louis
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RoleScientist Mentor: I will mentor teams of students online
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Research Interests (300 words)I am interested in the biodiversity and evolution of flowering plants. I focus my studies in the Neotropics, particularly in the northern Andes. Being born and raised in Colombia with a long time interest in the local flora, I have experienced the natural richness of these regions. These remote and poorly studied regions have yet to reveal the enormous amount of Biodiversity locked in these forests. What are the mechanisms of speciation and the historical processes explaining these highly diverse Andean forests? To achieve this, I would like to contribute to the taxonomic knowledge of these regions, as well as to elucidate why some areas are more diverse than others.
My academic formation has progressed from natural history to taxonomy, and after acquiring experience in detecting patterns at the species-level, I want to focus on the processes behind these patterns. My undergraduate thesis focused on the natural history of rare plants from the Valley of the Cauca River. I worked under the guidance of Dr. Philip Silverstone-Sopkin, an expert of the Cauca Valley’s tropical dry forest flora. I studied the flowering and fruiting of five species in a forest of this valley. Dealing with these species made me interested in taxonomy, which involves many aspects of an organism (evolutionary and ecologic). For my Masters I was mentored by Dr. Frank Almeda, a worldwide expert in the plant family Melastomataceae. I performed a comprehensive taxonomic treatment of an interesting group of species in the genus Miconia, combining morphological and molecular data. I also described several new species. Finally, for my PhD I work under the guidance of Dr. Nathan Muchhala, testing hypotheses on mechanisms that lead to disruption of gene flow and allopatric speciation. Currently, I focus on the effect of asynchronic flowering phenology among populations for several angiosperm species.
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AvailabilityI am NOT available, please temporarily remove me from the available mentor list
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Capacity: How many teams at a time are you comfortable working with?2
Recent Posts
Per 2 Team 11
Diana Lucia Gamba
Hi everybody, my name is Diana, sorry for my late reply!
So nice to meet everybody. I am also a graduate student at the University of Missouri St. Louis. I study plants in the cloud forests of Ecuador, and I'm trying to figure out what…
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Abominable Astronauts
Diana Lucia Gamba
Hey there! I'm having a little trouble with this interface. I don't see the research question in the info for this project. Who should be updating this? I'd like to help as much as I can but I'm not sure how...
Abominable Astronauts
Diana Lucia Gamba
Hey Joseph and everybody!
Nice interests, and you guys have learned so much already!
Being a scientist requires a lot of discipline and organization; working on a project can take a lot of time from designing the project, then taking the data,…
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