We are very pleased to announce the arrival of Alyssa. She arrived in June and started as Post-Doc in our lab.
In her research she is broadly interested in how climate change and especially rising temperatures impact the physiology of trees. Just prior to starting at EPFL, she graduated with her PhD in Biology from the University of Miami, where she used plant functional traits related to leaf temperatures and thermoregulation to study acclimation to elevated growing temperatures in subtropical and tropical trees in urban Miami and in the Amazon rainforest. Before that, she hunted down rare magnolia trees in Ecuadorian cloud forests. Now she is excited to shift her focus toward the temperate regions at EPFL, where she will be working mainly at Modoek (WSL) to uncover patterns between leaf temperatures, thermal tolerance, stomatal regulation, and photosynthesis in European beech and downy oak.