[2] Her Ph.D. thesis in entitled Birds and plants in a neotropical rain forest: seasonality and interactions.
From 1988 to 1990 she was an adjunct research associate at the Natural Resources Institute at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.
From 2006 to 2008 she was on a 2-year leave of absence to work as a program officer for the Division of Environmental Biology, National Science Foundation, Washington, D.C. At the University of Florida, since 2011 she has been a professor in the Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, as well as the director of the Tropical Conservation and Development Program at the University of Florida's Center for Latin American Studies.
She has done research on "the use of GIS methods in species distribution mapping, the ecological role of animals as seed dispersers, mating systems and life histories of tropical birds, and the potential effects of global change on the distribution of birds and their plant foods in tropical systems of the Western Hemisphere.
[5] In connection with the 2020 medal, at the Wilson Ornithological Society's annual meeting she gave the plenary lecture Three decades of studying Neotropical birds: lessons learned along the way.