Award for Global Engagement

Dr. Jennifer Powers is a world leader in tropical forest ecology who is dedicated to fostering international understanding and ensuring a respectful and collaborative approach to research and local engagement. Dr. Powers’s career has focused on increasing the knowledge of tropical forests and in building capacity to study these important global reservoirs of biodiversity and carbon storage. She has maintained ongoing field studies in Costa Rica and other tropical countries since 1994 and authored or co-authored over 128 peer-reviewed publications and co-edited a book on tropical dry forests. She has trained Ph.D. students from five countries that span four continents. In addition to fostering graduate education in tropical ecology, she developed an undergraduate Honors Seminar, “Tropical Forests: Conservation, Carbon, and Conflict.”

Throughout her career, she has been actively involved in promoting tropical science and conservation through the oldest and largest professional society focused on the tropics, the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation. She currently serves on the Executive Board and is the Editor-in-Chief of their flagship journal, Biotropica. Her service extends to her main study site in the Guanacaste Conservation Area in Northwestern Costa Rica. She co-founded and co-directs a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the science, conservation, and wise use of tropical dry forests in the Guanacaste Conservation Area.

She has been recognized for these efforts by being named an Honorary Fellow of the Ecological Society of America in 2020, and completed a Fulbright Global Award in 2022, visiting dry forests in Brazil, Cambodia, and Australia. In addition to ecology, Dr. Powers is increasingly interested in using art as a way to forge connections with nature, and a show highlighting recent artwork from her Fulbright travels was on display in May 2023 in the Biological Science Center of the College of Biological Sciences.