2022 Secretary's Diversity Award - As member of the Dept. of the Interior Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Strategic Plan team
2020 Exceptional Service Award - Team, Defenders of Wildlife, to the Endangered Species Act rollbacks team
2018 Exceptional Service Award - Team, Defenders of Wildlife, to the Center for Conservation Innovation
2013 Outstanding Teaching Award for Biology of Birds - The University of Texas, College of Natural Sciences
2011 President Powers Fellow - The University of Texas
2005 US Department of Interior Star Award for exceptional work practices
2004 US Department of Interior Star Award for exceptional work practices
2002 US Department of Interior Star Award for exceptional work practices
2000 US Department of Interior Duck Stamp award for field research
1996 Eagle Scout, Boy Scouts of America
1996 Boy’s State of Virginia delegate
1995 Vigil Honor, Order of the Arrow, Boy Scouts of America
Associate Editor for Conservation Letters
Reviewer for Conservation Science and Practice, BioScience, Endangered Species Research, Environmental Science & Policy, BMC Genomics, Behavioral Ecology, The Open Conservation Biology Journal, Animal Ecology, and Biology Letters
Graduate Student Assembly Representative for The University of Texas Section of Integrative Biology; member of Legislative Affairs Committee, 2010-2011
Tutor/Mentor, Defenders of Wildlife, 2015-present; University of Texas, College of Natural Sciences, 2008-2009; Lord Fairfax Community College, 1997-2000
Fully versed in standard software, e.g., Microsoft Office, GSuite, and many other applications such as MAMP, QGIS, various databases (e.g., SQLite, Elasticsearch, MongoDB). Experience with ArcGIS and other software.
Extensive programming experience with R, Python, Go, Bash, viml, HTML, CSS, SQL, and (more limited) Javascript, C, and C++; public code repositories at GitHub. Make extensive use of standard and emerging data science tools for analysis and reporting; see collections of tools at CCI home page. Statistical toolkit includes classical methods, from linear models to nonparametric classification, to emerging machine learning tools, including Natural Language Processing (e.g., topic modeling), image processing, and classification.
Early adopter of new software and hardware. On the software side, this includes web (e.g., Slack) and desktop applications, as well as early experimental developments like the dat protocol and the Beaker browser. Hardware includes web-connected weather stations, data loggers, and drones.
2014-present Mentor and advise graduate students in research. Statistics, high-performance computing, science communication for policy, and ESA
2018-2020 Endangered Species Act short course, Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation
2012-2013 Informal programming courses for undergraduates and graduate students
2009-2013 Biology of Birds, Spring semesters; Biostatistics, Fall semester
2008, 2010 Introductory Biology, parts I and II, Fall 2008 and Fall 2010 (respectively)
1993-1996 Camp Rock Enon (Boy Scouts), environmental science and High Adventure