Michael Forozis ’20 Finds His Calling in the Alaskan Wilderness

He is fascinated by the parts of the natural world most of us rarely stop to consider: the birds traveling thousands of miles between continents, the relationships among species sharing the same habitat, and the ecosystems carrying on far beyond the rhythms of human life. For Michael, understanding those worlds means getting as close to them as possible. 

That pursuit has taken him from the Peruvian Amazon to remote stretches of Alaska, where an interest in biology developed into a passion for field research and a desire to better understand, and ultimately protect, the natural world. 

“I remember loving AP Bio at Xaverian, especially the ecology portion,” Michael said. But it was during his junior year at UMass Amherst that his path began to take shape. 

Rather than spending a semester abroad in a more traditional destination, Michael traveled to the Peruvian Amazon. There, two avid birders, his program director and one of his professors, introduced him to a way of observing the natural world that captivated him.

“I admired that they could identify so many species by name,” he said. “By the end of the year, I was enamored.” 

He returned to UMass with a new fascination and eventually joined the Senner Lab, where researchers study the ecology and evolution of migratory shorebirds. For his honors thesis, Michael turned his attention to a bog in Beluga, Alaska, where he studied the movements of coyotes and Sandhill cranes, both predators of the Hudsonian godwit, a shorebird that migrates thousands of miles between its northern breeding grounds and southern South America. Using the thousands of photographs captured there by a grid of motion-activated cameras, he was able to analyze when and where the predators appeared. This allowed him to notice gaps in their distribution around the bog, and how those gaps overlapped with gull colonies. 

While the bog might seem like a dangerous place for a young bird to be, these colonies offer an unexpected benefit. Gulls aggressively harass coyotes and cranes to protect their own nests, making the surrounding area safer for godwit chicks. 

For Michael, seeing his analysis reinforce earlier research from the lab was exhilarating.

“It opened my eyes to the interconnectedness of everything,” he said, “and in turn the importance of collaboration and building on the work of others to get a holistic picture of natural systems.” 

Just days after graduating from UMass in 2024, Michael boarded a plane to Alaska, ready to physically immerse himself in the place that he had come to know so well through thousands of images. In the same bog that had been the subject of his thesis, Michael worked as a field technician for a graduate student studying Hudsonian godwit chicks. 

Suddenly, Michael was on the other side of the research. “It’s almost like my research experience was in reverse,” he said. “I first analyzed data, after which I gained  experience with the methodology in the field.” Instead of sorting through images produced by camera traps, he was setting them up. Instead of studying where birds had been, he was walking through the bog searching for their nests. When chicks hatched, the research team fitted them with tiny transmitters, then used handheld receivers to find them again and track their movement through the landscape.

“I had spent years aspiring to do research in the field, but until I went to Alaska these dreams and the images associated with them were so abstract,” he said. “Working in a place so wild and remote was my first taste of what this career could really be for me, and in that moment I knew I wanted this to be my future.”

A year after his initial trip, Michael found himself in Alaska once again, this time even further removed from everyday life. Through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, he traveled to East Amatuli Island, an uninhabited island off the Alaskan coast, for three weeks surveying tufted puffins and fork-tailed storm petrels.

To determine whether nesting burrows were active, Michael and the other researchers searched for clues: flattened vegetation near an entrance, traces of guano inside or, sometimes, feeling for the chick itself hidden deep inside a cliffside burrow.

Michael slept in a tent and relied on an outhouse and a small cabin stocked with canned food. Mornings started early, and the researchers often stayed out until sundown before returning to camp to eat and sleep. At the end of the day, there was no hot shower waiting.

“I think people tend to glorify living in rough conditions,” he said. “It’s not horrible, but it’s not glamorous by any means.”

And yet, removed from the conveniences and distractions of ordinary life, Michael found something he valued. On the nights when there was energy left, the group played cards, drank boxed wine, and listened to blues music coming through his supervisor’s small radio.

“The pace of living was relaxed and everything was stripped back to only bare necessities,” he said.

Perhaps that is part of what keeps drawing Michael to places like East Amatuli. The farther he gets from the world people have built, the more attention he can give to the one that was already there.

“There’s something inexplicably special to me about having a window into these far-away places,” he said. “I think when people consider planet Earth, they usually consider human life, but I’ve always thought of us as such a small part of what’s really going on here.”

Despite frequent travel, sometimes Michael’s work brings him back home. In 2025, between his two trips to Alaska, he worked at Duxbury Beach Reservation monitoring federally protected piping plovers and least terns.

There, he took another step forward as a researcher. Rather than simply contributing to an existing study, Michael proposed one of his own, examining how characteristics of the beach habitat might influence where piping plovers choose to nest. His supervisor approved the project, and this November, Michael will present his findings at the Duxbury Beach Park Coastal Ecology Symposium.

It is a small but important shift in his trajectory. Michael is no longer only helping other researchers answer their questions. Increasingly, he is beginning to ask his own questions, one of which could take him to yet another corner of the world. Michael is currently applying for a Fulbright scholarship to conduct research in New Zealand, where he has proposed studying seabirds that nest together in large colonies. He wants to know whether birds with nests close to one another also tend to search for food in similar places, potentially offering clues about how they share information or compete with their neighbors. 

The species and landscape may be different, but the underlying motivation is familiar: What is happening within these communities that we cannot immediately see? For Michael, field ecology offers something difficult to find elsewhere: a window into a world that does not revolve around us.

“Our entire impression of the world is based around our constructed reality,” he said, “but it’s when I’m farthest away from it all that I feel like I’m getting the most accurate picture.”

It is a perspective shaped in the Amazon, on an Alaskan bog, along a Massachusetts beach, and on the cliffs of an uninhabited island. In each place, Michael has had the opportunity to glimpse just a fraction of the countless movements, relationships, and migrations unfolding around us all the time.

The more he sees, the more he wants to understand.

“So much happens every single second that has absolutely nothing to do with any of us,” Michael said. “That’s what really interests me and is what I strive to understand, and ultimately to protect.”