Lucas Pavan
Graduation Year
2022
Lucas is a Ph.D. candidate supervised by Dr. Rodolfo Dirzo in the Biology Department. His research interests center on understanding how biodiversity influences key ecological processes which promote functional ecosystems and maintain human well-being. He particularly specializes in tropical ornithology and defaunation – the loss and decline of the world’s fauna.
He obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of British Columbia and joined the Manu Bird Project where he studied how territorial hummingbirds influence the movement of plant genes in the Peruvian Amazon. He was also part of the Borneo Rainforest Project where he studied how logging influences the maintenance of avian diversity in some of the oldest rainforests in the world. Since beginning his doctorate at Stanford in 2017, Lucas has been working with communities around the Dja Reserve in Southern Cameroon to understand the relationship between subsistence hunting, avian diversity, and their indirect effects on seed dispersal and disease regulation.
The Congo Basin Rainforest supports an estimated 75 million people and is a global epicenter of hunting pressure and emerging zoonotic disease. Lucas’ research is therefore positioned at the intersection between community conservation, food security, and the promotion of human health.