Michiel Van Breugel
Associate Professor
Since the start of my PhD research, my research has focused on the recovery of forests and trees in human-modified landscapes. I have made important contributions to our current understanding of how fast tropical forests ecosystems recover during succession, how this varies at the landscape scale and what drives this variation. My work has further provided some of the earliest and, up to now, strongest evidence that both local and landscape-scale processes drive both temporal change and spatial heterogeneity during tropical forest succession.
michiel.vanbreugel@yale-nus.edu.sg
Azlin Bin Sani
Field & Lab Manager
Azlin has spent over 10 years in conservation, leading various field studies associated with mangroves and tropical rainforests, locally and regionally. His passion for fieldwork has brought him to study trips to Indonesia, Brunei, and Malaysia on various invertebrate surveys with particular interests in spiders and stick insects.
azlin@yale-nus.edu.sg
Devesh Singh
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Dr. Singh’s research interest lies in exploring the effect of environmental and biological factors on plant’s physiology. He has been using various techniques to gain deeper insight into physiological process such as plant-water relations, photosynthesis, and limitation of plant growth under climatic stress like drought and salinity.
devesh.singh@yale-nus.edu.sg
M. Elizabeth Rodriguez-Ronderos
PhD Candidate
Elizabeth is a tropical plant community ecologist with expertise in forest dynamics. She holds an M.Sc. from the University of Wisconsin where she worked with Dr. Stefan Schnitzer understanding the effects of lianas on tropical forest tree structure. She has experience in early successional and secondary Neotropical forests and has also worked in the tropical forests of Sabah (Danum Valley), where she collaborated on liana and tree surveys. Elizabeth now holds one of only 6 four-year Ph.D. scholarships offered by Yale-NUS College. Her dissertation focuses on understanding plant community assembly from the landscape scale in abandoned pastures and agricultural fields of Panama, in one of the largest chronosequence research sites.
elizabeth.rodriguez@u.nus.edu
Jared Moore
Research Associate
Jared conducts interdisciplinary action research on ecological change in SE Asian forests and mangroves. He holds an MSocSci from NUS where he studied community mangrove management in Indonesia. He is primarily interested in how socio-economic factors drive ecosystem degradation and how we can address these complex problems with transdisciplinary social-ecological approaches. Currently, Jared’s work focuses on urban ecology in the managed landscapes of Singapore.
jared.moore@u.nus.edu
Lim Kiah Eng
Research Assistant
Kiah Eng devoted her undergraduate days to geography and aquatic ecology in the National University of Singapore Bachelor of Environmental Studies program. Her current research focuses on functional traits of urban trees and plant ecophysiology, with hopes that one day she can understand plants and their feelings better.
limkiaheng@yale-nus.edu.sg
Nikita Choudhary
Research Assistant
Nikita graduated from National University of Singapore (Bachelor of Environmental Studies) with research emphasis on aquatic ecosystems. She conducted molecular phylogenetic analyses on soft coral species in Okinawa, Japan and for her honours thesis she worked with Dr. Maxine Mowe and A/P Darren Yeo on a baseline study of microplastics in Singapore’s freshwater habitats. Currently, Nikita is leading a study on soil hydraulic conductivity, comparing the infiltration characteristics within urban parks to understand the suitability of different soil types for plant growth.
nikitach@nus.edu.sg
Lab Alumni
Taylor Sloey
Field & Lab Manager (2018-2020)
Taylor was in charge of a wide portfolio of teaching and research projects and is dearly missed! She is now an Assistant Professor leading the Wetland Plant & Restoration Lab at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, USA. She remains involved with our ongoing mangrove research.
