Federico Villatoro

•  Mar 2012 
  Graduate Teaching Assistantship. Conservation Medicine PhD Program, Universidad Andrés Bello Santiag
•  Sep 2003 
  "Best Thesis of the Year (2002)" Award. School of Veterinary Medicine, Universidad de San Carlos Gua
•  Jan 2003 
  German Academic Exchange Service- DAAD- Grant for Regional Graduate Studies View website

In 1995 I started the veterinary medicine school at Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala.

As an undergraduate veterinary student I focused my research interests in animal behavior, parasitology, and epidemiology with respect to wildlife study. My veterinary thesis focused on developing an Ethogram for an endangered psittacid in the wild, and studying the effect of different environmental enrichment types on the behavior of this psittacid in captivity.

For my graduate studies, in 2003, I went to Costa Rica to get an MSc in Wildlife Management and Conservation. There I gained experience in formulating and answering complex scientific questions about the effects of habitat fragmentation and land use changes of agricultural landscapes on parasite loads of bird populations. This time I took advantage of my prior veterinary education and combined it with tools, such as GIS and multivariate statistical analysis, for registering and analyzing spatial epidemiological and ecological data; an innovative research approach for that graduate program at that time. Here, I obtained research funding from a GEF-World Bank project called “Integrated Silvopastoral Approaches to Ecosystem Management”-ASIME which involved replicates of three countries: Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Colombia.

My responsibilities as a graduate student included being an associate researcher and teaching assistant, and then later on as an associate instructor for a multivariate statistical analysis course. After the completion of my thesis I continued on as a data manager for the entire ASIME project and a field ornithologist for the Costa Rican replicate. These opportunities provided experience to design and analyze biodiversity data matrices for agricultural landscapes. More importantly, as a field ornithologist I had the opportunity to explore and get additional perspectives on the role of agricultural landscapes, not only on maintaining biodiversity by means of corridors and gene flows for a metapopulation model scenario, but also on the potential flow of pathogens that are critical for biodiversity conservation and potential public health problems.

In 2008, I returned to the Veterinary Medicine School of Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala (USCG). There, I’ve worked as Research Coordinator, Graduate Professor and designed the first research based Master of Science program of the this veterinary school. I was also a research associate with the Center of Health Research at Universidad del Valle de Guatemala (UVG), working on various projects related to zoonotic diseases such as Rabies, Rickettsiosis and Chagas.

These have been great opportunities to gain experience to do interdisciplinary research, working with epidemiology, ecology and conservation projects.

I am currently enrolled in a Conservation Medicine PhD program at Universidad Andrés Bello (www.unab.cl) planning to work with Ecology of Infectious Diseases.

Centro de Estudios Ambientales de la Universidad del Valle de Guatemala (CEA-UVG). Rapid Ecological Evaluation and Bird Monitoring at CGN's Wildlife Reserve, Izabal, Guatemala.