Dr. J. Albert Uy (PhD, University of Maryland, College Park) is the Aresty Chair in Tropical Ecology at the Department of Biology. His work explores the origin and maintenance of biological species, with a special emphasis in tropical birds. He uses a combination of long-term field and experimental data with genetic and genomics approaches to understand how populations diversify to create new species. His field sites include Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, Australia, New Guinea and the Solomon Islands (where he teaches a field course on island ecology, evolution and conservation). Because Uy's work explores biodiversity, his research is intimately tied to grass roots conservation work in the Solomon Islands, where unique low-land rainforests are threatened by clear-cut logging.

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