Professor of Biology, Colorado Mesa University
Roles: Team leader, vision integration, project timeline management
Languages: English, Spanish
Dr. Walla is a tropical ecologist whose research and teaching have been focused on sampling and quantifying biodiversity in the upper Amazon for more than 25 years. He has used baited traps, malaise traps, hand nets, exhaustive searching, and a diversity of other approaches to sample birds, herpetofauna, plants, and insects in lowland tropical rainforest. His expertise is in Lepidoptera and the measurement of species interactions involving insects and plants. He is fluent in Spanish and has collectively spent more than 4 years living and working in the Ecuadorian rainforest and interacting with Quichua and Waorani people. He also led more than 10 field courses and set up multiple biodiversity monitoring programs in the rainforests of Ecuador.
Education
- Ph.D., Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Oregon, 2000
- B.A., Economics, University of California, San Diego, 1991