Diego Ellis Soto - Technical Assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Raldolfzell
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My earliest memory of childhood is being surrounded by rocks and dinosaurs at the University of Gottingen in Germany where my father was finishing his PhD and my mom worked at the university hospital. I remember memorizing the name of every dinosaur that was displayed and being fascinated by what acid could do to different rocks or minerals! I am pretty sure that this curiosity instigated my initial attraction towards spiders and snakes, followed by a somewhat weird childhood obsession with raccoons.
I have always been on the move, which led to my passion for travel and desire to learn how animals do it – otherwise known as movement ecology. I was born in the university town of Heidelberg, Germany and grew up speaking Spanish at home and German at school. By the age of seven, my family moved back to our home country of Uruguay. This period was followed by another move to Costa Rica where I attended a German high school. I then returned to Germany for my undergraduate degree and spent a year in Ecuador doing fieldwork for my research. During a six month stay on the Galapagos Archipelago collecting data for my Bachelor thesis, I had the opportunity to work on a project studying the movement patterns, reproductive ecology and ecosystem services of Galapagos tortoises. This was my formal introduction to the study of animal movement and I was immediately hooked. Ultimately this experience lead me to the University of Konstanz where I completed my master’s degree in Biological Sciences. Shortly after completing my master’s studies in Konstanz, I moved to in New Haven, Connecticut in the United States where I currently work as a visiting research scholar at Yale University while being employed by the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell. My current research interests lie in between spatial ecology and behavioral ecology with an emphasis on comparing the movement dynamic, distributions and resource use of individuals and populations among and within species. |