I am a faculty member in the Department of Biology and the Environmental Studies Program at Augsburg College in
Minneapolis, MN. I did my undergraduate work at the University of Minnesota (graduating in 2002), where I first learned about the formal study of primate behavior, ecology, and conservation, which led to my eventual graduate work. I completed my PhD in Biological Anthropology at Yale University in 2008, where my dissertation research focused on understanding the role of habitat heterogeneity in structuring chimpanzee populations. Following the completion of my dissertation fieldwork, I spent a year and a half in Leipzig, Germany working with a group of primate ecologists at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, where we did some comparative analyses of ape nutritional ecology across African study sites. Since finishing my PhD work in 2008, in addition to teaching at Augsburg and at Metropolitan State University (in St. Paul, MN), I have done consulting work for the University of Minnesota’s Natural Resources Research Institute and continue to study primates in the field. I have also been involved in projects investigating the ecological and socioeconomic correlates of bobcat harvest levels in Minnesota, the status of mammalian carnivores in the Lake Superior watershed, and habitat suitability for tiger populations in southern China.
Students at Augsburg or elsewhere are free to contact me about potential research opportunities. I have involved undergraduates in my research program in the past, both in field data collection and in data analysis and model construction, and I am always happy to work with enthusiastic students with an interest in wildlife ecology, conservation, and management.