Felisa A. Smith

Dr. Felisa Smith is a Professor at the University of New Mexico. A conservation paleoecologist, she integrates modern, historic and fossil mammal records to investigate pressing environmental issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss. Over her career she has worked on organisms from microbes to mammoth, but vastly prefers the latter. Most recently Smith has been using the terminal Pleistocene megafauna extinction as a proxy for understanding modern mammal biodiversity loss. In addition to her 3 books, she has written over 110 papers/book chapters in a wide variety of scientific journals, and taught scientific blogging at UNM. She has participated in many audio and video programs including National Public Radio, BBC World Service, BBC Earth, and BBC's Horizon series, German public radio, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and the History Channel as well as numerous print interviews/essays. Felisa was elected a Fellow of the Paleontological Society in 2020, and as of 2022 is the President-Elect of the American Society of Mammalogists and President of the International Biogeography Society.