Nathan Kraft, Ph.D.

Biosketch

I grew up running around the woods and mountains of New England, though my interest in ecology as a career was really cemented during a college semester abroad in Ecuador, when I got my first taste of Amazonian tropical forest diversity during a month stay in Yasuní National Park. I completed my graduate work with David Ackerly at Stanford and later UC Berkeley, studying community assembly patterns in a particularly diverse tropical forest plot in Yasuní near where I had visited as an undergraduate. I then spent several years as a Biodiversity Postdoctoral Fellow at University of British Columbia in Vancouver, before moving to a faculty position, first at University of Maryland, College Park, and more recently at UCLA.