Research Interests

I earned my PhD at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where I studied the causes of species diversity patterns in urban, fragmented ecosystems around the globe. This work was part of my broader interest in the spatial ecology of species’ interactions with their environments, and in using computational tools to analyze the causes of ecological patterns in nature. 

I am currently a quantitative ecologist at the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). I build mobile data collection applications to collect vast quantities of high quality continental-scale ecological data, and then process and analyze these data so they may be used by scientists worldwide to better understand the responses of communities and ecosystems to such disturbances as climate and land-use change.

Collectively, these projects have allowed me to hone skills relating to computational programming for big data analysis, statistics, database management, and other techniques critical to data science.