About me

I am a quantitative ecologist in the Center for Biodiversity and Global Change at Yale University, working with Dr. Walter Jetz on global scale models of biodiversity and animal movement. I lead a team of researchers and developers working on new models, methods, and infrastructures for high-resolution global species distribution models.

My personal research focuses on applying machine learning techniques to model global-scale patterns of biodiversity and species distributions. I am also interested in birth-death processes for population dynamics, niche modeling with animal movement data, and point-process models for metacommunity analysis. In general, I’m interested in developing models that unify multiple traditional ecological processes and/or data types.

I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where I was advised by Dr. Dan Sheldon. My dissertation was on a novel statistical framework for inference algorithms in count-valued distributions, particularly models of population dynamics. The document is available here.