Her first trip took her to Peru and Ecuador for two months. "Most of the time I was in the Andes mountains, but while I was in Peru I made a two-day trip to Tambopata, a rain forest refuge and research station in the Madre de Dios region of Peru. It was just a minor glimpse, but it was enough to tell me that I wanted to spend more time in the tropics."

Four years later, Amy returned to Tambopata. "I was incredibly lucky to be there at the same time as someone who studied birds there. He used rope-climbing techniques to get up to the treetops, and he had placed platforms in 30 especially tall trees so he could watch the birds. I was able to use his equipment to climb into one of the forest giants, and I looked down on a sea of green that extended as far as I could see." Amy explained that rain forest trees grow to greater heights than those in many temperate forests. The canopy--the level at which the foliage is the densest--is often at about 30 meters (nearly 100 feet), but some really huge trees can be more than 50 meters (more than 150 feet) tall.

"It just knocked my socks off. When I got home, all I wanted was to get back there so I could do it some more."

Amy started taking botany classes at the New York Botanical Garden. "I also signed on as an assistant on a two-week trip to French Guiana sponsored by NYBG. I had a fabulous time. But I still wasn't thinking about graduate school or changing careers or anything like that. It really never crossed my mind, because I don't think of myself as an academic sort of person, but I kept taking my botany classes and kept loving them."

Amy was finding her botany courses more interesting than her work as a graphic artist. And on top of it all, the skills she needed in that business were changing. "It began to be clear that I would have to learn computer design if I was going to keep up with the times. That's when the lightbulb went off: If I'm going to go back to school to learn something new, why not learn about something I really want to do?"

Amy found a program sponsored jointly by the City University of New York and the New York Botanical Garden. "I knew I wanted to study plant-animal interactions. At first I thought I might study bat-pollinated plants, but then I took an entomology class at the American Museum of Natural History and discovered the Cerambycidae, a family of beetles that includes some of the most spectacularly beautiful species imaginable." In fact, Amy told us, the largest beetle in the world is a cerambycid: It's called Titanus giganteus, and it can be as big as 17 centimeters long--that's practically 7 inches. The cerambycids led her to central French Guiana and to research into the relationship between certain species of these beetles and five different species of tropical trees.

"So now I'm a Ph.D. student. It's hard to say what my subject is. My advisers come from all kinds of disciplines: There's a botanist, a plant chemist, an ecologist, and three entomologists. When I'm done, though, I won't be a botanist or an entomologist. I guess I consider myself a tropical biologist, though the truth is, I don't like to be classified."

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