I love being a biology professor at Gustavus.  I get to interact with interested, interesting students and colleagues excited about their work, teach topics I love, and take students out into the natural world to explore.  These explorations have taken us all around southern Minnesota, to South Dakota, South Africa, and Central and South America.  Most of the far-flung destinations have been via experiential IEX January courses, but research has taken my students and me to South Africa (for African lions) and South Dakota (for American bison). 

I am an ecologist with an abiding interest in the connections between animal behavior, ecology, conservation and management. I grew up roaming the hills of California, and went to Tanzania to study African lions for my PhD.  I spent parts of the next 7 years working with lions in South Africa before moving my work closer to home.  The bison project now engages Gustavus students every summer on the Samuel H. Ordway Prairie in South Dakota, and keeps us busy with data analysis during the school years.  For more information, see my research page. I teach courses in vertebrate zoology, animal behavior, and evolution, two of the introductory major courses (101 & 202), and serve as the pre-veterinary advisor.