My Journey

I am a Peruvian scientist, a Native American raised in the heart of the Amazon, and a researcher deeply invested in the future of tropical forests. My life and career have been shaped by the environment I grew up in, giving me a profound personal motivation to understand and protect the Amazonian ecosystem.

Currently, I serve a dual role: I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (MPI-BGC) in Jena, Germany, and an Assistant Professor at the National University of the Peruvian Amazon (UNAP) in Iquitos, Peru, which is also my alma mater.

Early Career and Foundation in the Field

My academic journey began at UNAP, where I received my B.S. in Tropical Ecology from the School of Forestry and an M.Sc. in Environmental Management from the School of Agronomy. Following my studies, I joined the teaching faculty at UNAP, instructing courses on the Ecology of Amazonian Ecosystems, Ecological Modeling, GIS, and Remote Sensing. Teaching allowed me to integrate my coursework directly into my research, collaborating with colleagues and students on forest inventory studies, soil sampling, and the remote sensing of unmapped regions of the Amazon.

The Turning Point: Large-Scale Disturbance Dynamics

A major milestone in my career was participating in a large-scale, NASA-funded project entitled Tropical Forest Tree Species Community Assemblage along Wind Disturbance Gradients. Working alongside researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, I led fieldwork in both Iquitos, Peru, and Manaus, Brazil. Leveraging my on-the-ground expertise, I established extensive inventory plots in windthrown regions at varying stages of recovery.

To build the technical skills necessary for this work, I sought out international training. I traveled to Pennsylvania State University (USA, 2013) for Forest Inventory and Remote Sensing, Rakuno Gakuen University (Japan, 2015) for Forest Resource Remote Sensing, and the University of Melbourne (Australia, 2017) for data mining as part of the REDD+ project.

Bridging Two Worlds: Jena and Iquitos

That global perspective ultimately drove me to Germany, where I was accepted into the International Max Planck Research School for Global Biogeochemical Cycles. I successfully defended my Ph.D. at Friedrich Schiller University Jena and MPI-BGC in 2025. My ultimate goal is to shape scientific practice by bridging basic ecosystem science with actionable insights, contributing to cutting-edge research while representing the Amazonian communities where my story began.