Mercedes Suarez Foster (born August 16, 1942) is an American zoologist who researched the evolution of lek behavior in birds, bird-plant interactions, and male-male cooperation in reproduction.
She is also the Director and Editor of a program to publish handbooks giving "standard methods for measuring and monitoring the biodiversity of different groups of organisms".
She was not born into an outdoorsy family and so did not have much interaction with wildlife and the outdoors until her senior year of college at the University of California, Berkeley.
She was also a research associate at the Department of Vertebrate Zoology at the Smithsonian Institution from 1984 to 1990 and at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County from 1979 to 1982.
[4] She is a research zoologist and Curator-in-Charge of the Bird Section at the National Museum of Natural History as well as being the Director and editor of the Standard Methods for Measuring and Monitoring Biological Diversity Project since 1990.