I am an urban ecologist whose research focuses on urban wildlife ecology and human-environment interaction. This research integrates fieldwork, geospatial analysis, and computational modelling to identify links between anthropogenic landscapes, wildlife, human populations, and human health and well-being. My research in the Midwestern U.S. has built understanding of wildlife communities and interactions between people and nature in understudied small cities in agricultural contexts, advancing our ability to manage these cities to support biodiversity and human well-being.  I conduct regional-to-global scale work as part of the Urban Wildlife Information Network (UWIN), a network of researchers in over 60 cities who use the same monitoring methods to build large, multi-year datasets to support multi-city analyses. This research examines how relationships between urban wildlife, landscapes, and people vary within and among cities and regions. This work has identified key connections between urban landscapes, social processes such as gentrification, and wildlife communities and their implications for the distribution of urban environmental benefits and hazards. I oversee UWIN monitoring sites in two metropolitan areas, the Iowa City-Cedar Rapids metropolitan area of eastern Iowa and the Dublin metropolitan area in Ireland, a site that I founded and coordinate in collaboration with colleagues at University College Dublin and Maynooth University. This research advances regional-to-global scale urban ecological theory, building understanding to support urban planning and conservation and the design of biodiverse, healthy cities.

I have taught ten classes at the University of Iowa, ranging from large lecture classes (Contemporary Environmental Issues) to graduate seminars focused on topics in urban ecology and conservation. My current teaching includes three classes: SEES:2950 (Environmental Conservation), SEES:3350 (Urban Ecology), and SEES:4600 (Biogeography, Ecology, and Conservation of Mammals). I am also the Director of Graduate Studies for SEES and oversee the design and management of our graduate programs and our graduate student evaluation and admissions processes.