I am a field biologist whose primary area of research is forest restoration and conservation biology in the tropics. For the last two decades my primary field site has been the tropical dry forest of the Area de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG), a large national park in NW Costa Rica, I  was one of the founders of IACG, an organization that connects research, teaching, and management in the ACG. Although my training is in ecology and evolutionary biology my recent work in Costa Rica has focused on developing strategies for the archiving and dissemination of scientific information to non-scientist end-users, such as conservation managers, educators, and eco-entrepreneurs.

Recently I have begun working on questions of tracking and modeling animal movement and habitat occupancy both in Costa Rica and Pennsylvania. To that end we have developed agent-based models that simulate the movement of organisms through an urban environment. Recently we have developed and tested DIY wildlife cameras based on the Raspberry Pi platform in order to document urban and suburban wildlife such as flying squirrels.

At Jefferson, I have been involved with a group of faculty and students working on the Sustainability in Motion project, in which animation students help to translate scientific concepts into on-line learning modules. I am broadly interested in pedagogical questions of how models-based science teaching can be used to reinforce concept acquisition in biology.

NSF Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN, 2006

PhD in Biology - University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 2003

BS in Biology - Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, IL, 1998