Talía Pérez Martínez is from Guanabo, Ciudad de la Habana, Cuba. She received her B.Sc. in Biology in 2004 from Havana University. She holds the position of Coordinator for Cuba’s National Waterbird Program. In this capacity she conducts basic research about waterbirds and monitors waterbird population status, specializing in studies of population dynamics of several sandpiper populations that winter in Cuban wetlands. Through her position, she manages a database of the waterbirds that frequent Cuba’s protected areas. She is responsible for the management and protection of thirteen of Cuba’s most important waterbird conservation areas. She also works with environmental education themes in several of the local Cuban schools.

Talia’s participation with Audubon’s Seabird Restoration Program is part of an ongoing collaboration with the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and the MacArthur Foundation to provide training for young conservation biologists in Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. This collaboration also brought biologist Ivan Mota of the Dominican Republic to Maine in 2011 and Haitian biologists Enold Louis-Jean and Anderson Jean to Maine in 2009.