Felisa Smith is a Distinguished Professor in the department of Biology. 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 >110 papers/book chapters in a wide variety of scientific journals, and taught scientific blogging at UNM (https://unm-bioblog.blogspot.com). 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, was awarded the Merriam Award from the American Society of Mammalogists in 2022, and is the 68th recipient of the UM Annual Research Lecturership in 2023. She is currently the President of the American Society of Mammalogists and Past President of the International Biogeography Society.