Robin Chazdon is Professor Emerita in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at the University of Connecticut and Research Professor with the Tropical Forests and People Centre at the University of the Sunshine Coast. Her long-term and on-going collaborative research focuses on successional pathways, forest dynamics, drivers of land-use change, and functional ecology of trees in Neotropical forests. Chazdon served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Biotropica, as President of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation, and as a member-at-large of the governing board of the Ecological Society of America. She currently serves as the Executive Director of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation and Director of the NSF-funded Research Coordination Network PARTNERS (People and Reforestation in the Tropics), focused on understanding the socio-ecological drivers of reforestation in the tropics. After 28 years as a university professor, Dr. Chazdon is moving into the science-policy arena in forest landscape restoration. She recently became a Senior Fellow with the World Resources Institute Global Restoration Initiative, where she is working to enhance decision support tools for landscape restoration and promote natural regeneration in restoration planning. She is also a Senior Associate Research with the International Institute for Sustainability in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She is an author of over 170 peer-reviewed scientific articles and co-editor of two books on tropical forests. Her sole-authored book “Second growth: The promise of tropical forest regeneration in an age of deforestation” was published in 2014.