Dr. Jorge Ahumada is the Senior Wildlife Conservation Scientist with Conservation International's Betty and Gordon Moore Center for Science. A native of Colombia and an ecologist by training, Jorge worked as an Associate Professor at Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, where he founded a research lab on population and community ecology of cloud forests before joining Conservation International. In 2000, he came back to the US to work on applied projects, including models of malaria transmission in Hawaiian birds and tropical tree dynamics. Jorge has extensive field, quantitative and theoretical expertise in ecology and conservation, and he is interested in the application of quantitative methods to measure and manage natural capital.
Previously at Conservation International he has championed the use of camera traps and the Wildlife Picture Index as tools to monitor protected area effectiveness and ecosystem health as the Executive Director of the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) Network.
Jorge obtained his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1996. He likes the outdoors, cooking, savoring good wine and is a frequent salsa dancer.