Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program:
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

I joined the New York Unit as a Post-Doc in January 2015, after 2 years in the Maine Unit working on integrated population modeling for black bears in the state. Before that I was a graduate student at Michigan State University in the Fisheries and Wildlife department. My dissertation research examined relationships between forest management practices and bird communities in the Pacific Northwest. I grew up in RI and am a passionate fan of the Boston sports teams (as well as the MSU Spartans). Aside from watching and playing sports, I also enjoy traveling, camping, and snowboarding.. I am broadly interested in wildlife population modeling and the estimation of relationships between species and environments at multiple scales. I use field data that have been collected by myself or others to quantify various metrics of interest (e.g., species distributions and abundances, demographic parameters) that can be helpful for informing management and conservation, or enhancing ecological understanding. I am particularly interested in hierarchical modeling to properly partition variation among relevant dimensions, including individuals, space, and time. A majority of my work has used the BUGS language to specify and estimate model parameters in a Bayesian framework, though I am open to many other methods of inference depending on the objectives. My research in Maine involved using integrated population models to jointly estimate demographic parameters and identify the surve...