We have the pleasure to welcome Helena as a new post-doc in our team. She joined PERL at mid-October, her international background made her arrival an interesting decovery. She graduated in Environmental Biology and did her PhD in Terrestrial Ecology at Universitat autonoma de Barcelona-CREAF. Afterwards she did her first postdoc at MIT, in Boston. Her research has always been around nutrients and the plant-soil system (N, P, K…) at different scales. She reveals that she has always tried to combine fieldwork and modeling by aggregating field measurements and obtaining larger scale trends that can be used to improve model’s accuracy. At PERL she will work on the response of European/Swiss forests to nitrogen deposition, under the project ReClean.
We are very pleased to announce the arrival of two new master students working on their own project: Léo and Marie.
Léo started his studies at EPFL in 2019, and after a bachelor in Environmental Engineering, he continued for a Master specialized in Monitoring & Modeling of the Environment. After some projects involving remote sensing, including one here at PERL exploring the potential of aerial LiDAR measurements for forest monitoring, he wanted to come back to the field do the measurements himself. He joined Alice’s project for his master thesis, to measure the critical temperature (Tcrit) of three conifer species in Switzerland and explore the relationship between Tcrit and climate variables.
Marie has also accomplished her bachelor degree at EPFL, and now she is working on her master thesis with Thibaut. Her project implies studying and modeling (using various climate change scenarios) frost resistance as a potential barrier to the invasion of evergreen species in Ticino.
A warm welcome to you all! Good luck with your research!