Class of 2026: Pablo Lopez-Bustamante spreads seeds of knowledge

By Amelia Heymann

Pablo Lopez-Bustamante's journey from his native Colombia to Virginia Commonwealth University started with a social media post.

After working in the environmental consulting industry for a decade, Lopez-Bustamante realized his passions lay elsewhere. Around 2020, he came across a tweet from Catherine M. Hulshof, Ph.D., associate professor in VCU's School of Life Sciences and Sustainability within the College of Humanities and Sciences. She was looking for someone to study the function of tropical forest trees across space and time.

"When I saw that call on Twitter I said, 'This is my cup of tea. This is what I wanted to do the rest of my life,'" Lopez-Bustamante said.

That journey marks a milestone this spring as he earns his Ph.D. in integrative life sciences at VCU. Along the way, Lopez-Bustamante helped establish an internship program with another university and created a database of seed traits that will be a lasting resource for research ecologists.

"Pablo is an exceptional researcher whose innovative ideas, creative outreach and extensive experience in tropical forests make him a standout VCU graduate student," Hulshof said, noting the value of his focus on how global change is impacting neotropical and Caribbean dry forests.

Lopez-Bustamante said he was drawn to VCU by Hulshof's research in Latin America, which aligned with his life and work. As part of her Biodiversity Research Lab, Hulshof's extensive international network of collaborators provided access to a large database of 500 vegetation plots across the neotropical and Caribbean dry forests, and she encouraged her new student to explore it.

Lopez-Bustamante discovered how the tropical dry forests in the Caribbean were dominated by tree species that took hold when animals dispersed the seeds, while the continental dry forest is dominated by wind-dispersed species. The findings aligned with a classical theory in ecology that had yet to be tested.

He also was awarded a scholarship from the New York Botanical Garden to collect more data beyond the Caribbean for the whole tropical dry forest of the Americas. This led him to co-establish an internship for undergraduate students at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. They helped collect seed masses in the garden's extensive herbarium, and they measured seed traits, such as weight, color and dispersal type, for several thousand tropical dry forest species that highlight variations between the Americas' mainland and Caribbean islands. Lopez-Bustamante also collected information from the Universidad de Antioquia and Jardin Botanico de Medellin's herbarium collections.

"He is a wonderful mentor to undergraduate students, and it was a pleasure for me and a group of undergraduate students from my university to work with him," said Martin Dovciak, Ph.D., professor and coordinator of the environmental biology major at SUNY ESF, who noted that this seed database will provide significant support to research ecologists.

Lopez-Bustamante wants to continue his research and has applied to several post-doctorate programs across the United States. A colleague has even offered to keep working with him on researching seed dispersal in tropical forests.

"Researching specifically in this area has opened different avenues and opportunities," Lopez-Bustamante said. "I expect to continue working in academia."

And he said he is grateful to how his Ph.D. program has opened those doors: "I haven't lacked anything that I needed to conduct my research at VCU."