Louis. His first experience in tropical biology came after college, when he spent a year in Ecuador with a Fulbright Fellowship studying bat pollination in cloud forests. He has been returning to the tropics ever since, through his Ph.D. with the University of Miami and postdoctoral positions with the University of Toronto and University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and has published 30 papers on this research, including studies of plant-plant competition for pollinators, a bat-flower coevolution, nectar bat foraging behavior, evolutionary tradeoffs, and descriptions of new species of nectar bats and plants. Current members of his lab at UMSL hail from and work in Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador, and study both the plant and animal perspectives of bat pollination systems.