Faculty Job Talk Practice Sessions for Postdoctoral Scholars in Environmental Science

All postdoctoral scholars, PhD students, and faculty are invited to attend a series of practice faculty job talks featuring postdocs currently on the academic job market. Speakers and Talk Titles: Boya Zhang: Advancing Remote Sensing for Inland/Coastal/Marine Hydrology and Habitat Change Assessment David Herrera Ramírez: Tree and forest resilience: carbon storage, safety margins, and restoring persistent forests Patricia: Fire in a changing climate: contemporary and future shifts in tropical flammability Speaker Bios: Boya ("Paul") Zhang is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Yale School of the Environment, where he integrates satellite Earth observations and artificial intelligence to study water availability and ecosystem dynamics. His research focuses on understanding where water is, how its availability changes over time, and how inland and coastal habitats respond to flooding, hurricanes, sea-level rise, and water management. David Herrera Ramírez is a forest ecophysiologist and Hutchinson Postdoctoral Associate at Yale. He studies how carbon and water cycling and physiological safety margins shape tree survival and recovery after disturbances, forest resilience and ecosystem services, and how these mechanisms can guide restoration and conservation efforts. Patrícia Silva is an environmental engineer with a PhD in Geophysics who specializes in fire–climate dynamics in tropical ecosystems. With over a decade of experience at the intersection of Earth observation, climate science, ecology, and policy, she studies how climate variability and human activity shape contemporary and future fire regimes. She is currently a Postdoctoral Associate at YSE, investigating the drivers of extreme fires in the Amazon.