About me

I am an ecological statistician/quantitative ecologist and a research scientist at the Wisconsin Cooperative Research Unit in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I work closely with faculty at UW Madison, with ecologists and statisticians at the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center, and with ecologists at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

I am interested in developing and applying novel statistical methods to improve basic environmental science, while simultaneously trying to make that science more relevant to society. Broadly speaking, my goal is to use ideas from theoretical ecology to optimize natural resource management under uncertainty, and to further learn about ecological mechanisms given new data arising from environmental change.

I believe in leading with curiousity. Advancement and applications of science are predicated on the desire to learn. Questions always lead to further questions at all scales. I am fascinated by the abstract beauty of how mathematics and statistics can describe life on earth, and how we leverage these abstractions to further understanding in the era of global change.

My research interests are focused in 3 major areas:

Statistical Ecology

• Development of complex statistical models to analyze ecological data, particularly in a Bayesian framework
• Development and application of machine-learning algorthims to help with ecological prediction, and to aid new sampling methods

Population Ecology

• Development of integrated population models, to forecast under varying management actions.
• Development of spatio-temporal time-to-event known fate survival models

Disease Ecology

• Studying the effects of environmental, genetic, and population drivers of disease dynamics.
• Development of spatial and temporal force of infection disease models