About myself.....

I was born in Lima, Peru where I studied Biology and Chemistry in the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia. In 1991 I traveled to Punta San Juan, a Marine Reserve in southern Peru, to meet for first time wild marine animals such as fur seals, sea lions, penguins, cormorants, pelicans, boobies, gulls and terns. A friend of mine, Rosana Paredes, encouraged me to start working with seabirds and in April 1992 we began to study the breeding ecology of the Endangered Humboldt Penguin at Punta San Juan with funds from the Wildlife Conservation Society. In 1993, we traveled for a short period to Punta Tombo-Argentina to learn how to work with wild penguins under the supervision of Dr. Dee Boersma.

From 1993 to 1997, I lived at Punta San Juan studying the penguins, meeting a lot of friends and collecting information on the breeding biology, diet and population size of Guanay cormorants, Peruvian Pelicans and Inca terns. During this period I also visited some other headlands and islands along the Peruvian coast to carry out studies on the maximum diving depth of Peruvian Diving-petrels and the nesting ecology of Peruvian terns. By mid- 1997, I defended my Licenciatura thesis on the breeding ecology of Inca terns.

After finishing the research at Punta San Juan, I worked in the Department of Marine Mammals of The Peruvian Marine Research Institute (IMARPE), where I was helping in the study of population size, distribution and diet of South American fur seals and South American sea lions along the Peruvian coast. In the summer of 1999 I participated in the IX Peruvian Antarctic Expedition, sighting and counting seabirds and marine mammals at sea. After returning from Antarctica, I received a short-term scholarship from the National Park Zoo, Smithsonian Institution and traveled to Washington DC to analyze the Humboldt Penguin Project data under the advice of Dr. Daryl Boness. In the following years, I participated in the census of Humboldt penguins in the southern-central coast and conducted a population count of Red-legged cormorants in Peru.

In 2000 I seriously though to search a graduate program to be involved in. I was accepted in the Department of Biological Sciences, University of North Carolina at Wilmington and began my Master degree in Fall 2001. Since the first day at UNCW, I decided to study the foraging ecology of the Blue-footed boobies in northern Peru under the supervision and support of my advisor Dr. Steve Emslie.