Sunshine Van Bael

Sunshine has been on Tulane’s faculty since 2012, where she currently teaches Biostatistics, Tropical Ecology & Agriculture, Wetlands Ecology and Diversity of Life. Before arriving at Tulane, she was a member of the scientific staff at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama since 2009, and she did several post-doctoral fellowships there as well. She participated in the OTS 3M graduate student course during her Ph.D. work at the University of Illinois and at STRI.

She is a community ecologist who is interested in how plants, animals and microbes use symbioses with other organisms to feed themselves and to defend themselves from enemies. In particular, she has worked in cacao agroecosystems to study the ecosystem services of biodiversity in tropical areas. At Tulane, she has been building a research program around coastal issues in the Gulf, especially around baldcypress swamps and salinity intrusion.

Her research program has been active in Panama, Costa Rica and Ecuador for almost two decades, and she has been involved in numerous mentoring and outreach activities. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief for the Journal Ecosphere, published by the Ecological Society of America.