Fausto Sarmiento is a full professor of geography at the University of Georgia and an internationally recognized leader of montology who directs the Neotropical Montology Collaboratory. He looks into human-environment interactions informed by evidence of landscape transformation and dynamics of land cover/land use change, with critical biogeography, political ecology insights, historical documentation, neoecological field research and modeling for alternative scenarios of sustainability and regenerative development.

Working at the intersection of tropical mountain geographies, he contributes research at the forest transition and other active boundaries, such as the Andean treeline, Andean sustainable development, or the implication of biocultural heritage on Andean sacred sites and indigenous revival. By studying the role of human impacts in shaping the neotropical highlands, he is reconstructing ecological theory applicable to Andean farmscape transformation and Andean identity markers in the midst of global environmental change, developing new narratives of mountain sustainability as tropical environments are constructed, represented, claimed, and contested. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Belmont Forum, the Smithsonian Institution, the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, the MacArthur Foundation, the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, the Scott Neotropic Fund, the Exposition Foundation, and other sources.