In 2001 she was awarded an MA from Columbia University, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in the Ecology and Evolution Biology program.
In 2018 Liliana Dávalos secured the position of tenured professor at Stony Brook University, and has continued to maintained her connection to the AMNH as a Research Associate in the Division of Vertebrate Zoology.
Though Dávalos’ breadth of work has included an array of fields, her primary research efforts focus on the evolution of physiological and molecular traits.
[3][4] Notable works by Dávalos have included those on the evolution of frugivorous bats, which has helped illuminate the relationship between species diversification rates and novel morphological characteristics.
[5] Her attention to the analysis of methods has produced a substantive critique on the conflict of morphological and molecular tools for studying evolutionary processes,[6] and demonstrated how common sampling bias can drastically affect conservation assessments.