Forest R.

Travel article describing several off-the-beaten-path destinations in the northern Peruvian Andes.

Mendoza put Argentine wines on the world map, but Argentina's wine country extends far beyond Mendoza's borders. Defying aridity and extreme heat, vines spring forth from El Cuyo, or the Burning Lands, an expansive system of valleys that stretches from northern to central Argentina. Relatively little wine from other valleys hits the export market, making El Cuyo a must-go destination for wine lovers.

An Inca necropolis named Puerto Inca lies on the Peruvian coast in between more popular destinations. Often overlooked by travellers, Puerto Inca offers the unique experience of walking amongst the skeletons of humans past. No barrier separates the living from the dead here. In contrast to the bones, the coastal waters here teem with life. All told, Puerto Inca makes for a fulfilling but surreal stop along Peru's desert coast.

The Atacama Desert looks empty but is anything but. A world of individually unique salt flats, extreme desert life and strange humans exists in between prime tourist destinations like San Pedro de Atacama. Ancient history announces itself by hillside geoglyphs, the mineral remains of waterfalls hint at a wetter past and strange but welcoming desert dwellers color every corner of this vast desert. Those seeking to escape the tourist crowd can hardly choose a better place to escape.

Travel article meant to inspire a desire to explore Bolivia. The story focuses on a tour through Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni and beyond, using one of the cheapest tour operators available and during winter conditions in which many of the normal attractions were not accessible due to inclement weather. Despite adverse conditions and on-the-spot tour decisions, we discovered that one can't really go wrong in such a strange and amazing place.

Local farmers living along Peru's Rimac River have embarked on a combined reforestation and water storage project, which both provides safe water and empowers the local community to manage their own water security. In doing so, they have also improved local mountainside soil stability, thereby reducing the risk of devastating landslides. Article link: https://theecologist.org/2017/jul/20/securing-future-water-along-perus-rimac-river-valley

Coffee cultivation is both a point of pride and a significant economic driver for Colombia but a changing climate threatens the harvest. This article addresses the new challenges facing Colombian coffee growers and the adaptations they have made to confront them. Article link: https://theecologist.org/2017/mar/21/ecologist-special-report-colombian-coffee-growers-adapt-changing-climate

The end of hostilities between the Colombian government and the FARC opens large swaths of Colombian territory to development of all sorts. This article describes the environmental concerns of both wartime and post-conflict land use and how ecological conservation may play a role in the successful rollout of a peaceful post-conflict transition. Article link: https://theecologist.org/2017/feb/10/ecologist-special-report-ecological-conservation-post-conflict-colombia

To address the issue of low complexity genome-wide assays in pharmacological and functional genomic screens, I led the development of a novel a low-cost, genome-wide mRNA profiling methodology specifically designed to complement high-throughput screening assays. This method proved 10- to 20-fold less expensive than conventional RNA-Seq. The use of network-based algorithms to infer protein activity from our data results in comparable reproducibility to 30 M read sequencing.