Dr. Iroro Tanshi is a Washington Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington, working on ecological communities. As part of a research agenda to target historically understudied areas, she is currently focused on West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea forests, where she studies dietary traits in insectivorous bats and species interactions. Through rigorous field surveys in the mountains of southeastern Nigeria, Dr. Tanshi’s work has challenged dogma that originally suggested that bat communities in tropical Africa are not diverse. Iroro got her start on bats over a decade ago in Nigeria, and through her work we now know that there are over 100 bat species in the country, two of which are threatened with extinction. One of those species – the short-tailed Roundleaf bat, rediscovered 45 years after the last sighting, is now the focus of a conservation program in the Gulf of Guinea Forest. Iroro, also co-leads an NGO Small Mammal Conservation Organization that works with local communities to protect critical forest and bat habitat in Nigeria, while expanding capacity and research infrastructure in West Africa. She enjoys hiking, and swimming.