Marina LaForgia

I am plant community ecologist broadly interested in how environmental variability and species invasions shape plant communities and how responses to past, current, and future variability can be understood through functional traits. Much of my work focuses on understanding these responses through the early life stages of seeds and seedlings in highly invaded temporally variable environments. My research integrates demography, experimental manipulations, long-term monitoring, and novel modeling techniques to understand these complex interactions.

I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Biological Sciences Department at CSU Sacramento where I teach Plant Taxonomy and Ecology. Prior to that, I was a USDA NIFA Postdoctoral Fellow and a L'Oréal For Women in Science Fellow in Dr. Jennifer Gremer’s lab at UC Davis and Dr. Lauren Hallett’s lab at the University of Oregon. Watch the video L'Oréal produced about me and my work below.

I completed my PhD at UC Davis in the Ecology Graduate Group under the guidance of Drs. Susan Harrison and Andrew Latimer. My early research interests were inspired by the diverse strategies that plants have evolved in variable climates, especially seed dormancy and the ability to form seed banks. For my dissertation, I studied how interactions with invasive annual grasses affected native annual forb with variable resource acquisition strategies.

I grew up in Southern California outside of LA and completed my undergraduate degree in International Studies & Economics at UC San Diego. My drive to understand environmentally sustainable development led me to uncover a passion for plants and ecology.