Assistant Curator, Museum of Paleontology,
Assistant Professor, Earth and Environmental Sciences
(she/her)
[email protected]
Office Information:
3234 Biological Sciences Building
Museum of Paleontology;
Curators
Education/Degree:
M.S. in Geosciences from The Pennsylvania State University (2011)
Ph.D in Plant Biology from Cornell University (2017)
About
Her research aims to understand how plants and tropical ecosystems have changed through geologic time. Mónica collects and studies plant fossils in tropical South America, and uses observational and experimental approaches to better understand the paleobiology and evolution of tropical rainforests. Her work documents how interactions between plants and insect herbivores are recorded in leaf damage, form-function relations of leaves, and how acclimation responses of tropical plants to climate change can inform ecosystem function in deep time.