My Career

Sometimes people are curious about my career, the different jobs that I've done and how I ended up in my current position. This page recounts a lot of the material from my CV, but in a more narrative form with a little more detail about the projects. If you have any questions about my work, past or present, please reach out to me by email or social media.

My scientific career has spanned a few domains of research, multiple continents, cities and wilderness — but it has always been focused on animals. Wildlife and wildlands inspire me, and I was fortunate to discover this early in my life. I am also privileged to have had access to paying jobs that let me pursue and develop this interest into a scientific career.

I spent much of my early career working as a wildlife technician. My first jobs were summer seasonal positions at North East Ecological Services with one of my former biology teachers and then with the US Forest Service in Montana, studying bats in threatened and under-studied habitats. After college I continued seasonal work, contracting with NOAA's Marine Mammal Lab for several years to study northern fur seals on Saint Paul Island and Steller sea lions near Kodiak, AK. In the winter months, I found employment as a herpetology field assistant at El Verde Field Station in Puerto Rico, then as an intern and, later, crew manager with the long-running "guppy mark-recapture" project in the northern mountains of Trinidad. Between projects, I also volunteered occasionally with the Blue Iguana Recovery Programme in Grand Cayman. 

After a few years of seasonal field work, I took a hiatus and found employment in New York, NY, as an associate editor with Nature Publishing Group — now Springer Nature — for the journal Lab Animal, where I learned all aspects of scientific publishing from a small journal's perspective. It was a fascinating experience, but after just a year and a half with Nature Publishing I secured an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship that allowed me to pursue my PhD at the Duke University Marine Lab.

Working there with the Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing lab, I enjoyed a wealth of field research and teaching opportunities. I learned to fly drones, and I shared our group's research to audiences as young as kindergarteners and as old as retirees, in classrooms, online, and remotely from the field. Eventually I assembled a dissertation focused on developing drone applications to study pinnipeds, with chapters on populations in Alaska, the northwest Atlantic, and the Antarctic Peninsula. For the Antarctic chapter, I traveled to Palmer Station, Antarctica, for three seasons, where I designed and executed a series of drone surveys to study the seasonal dynamics of the region's Antarctic fur seals (article in prep.). While at Palmer Station, I also served as a cetacean researcher for the Palmer Antarctica Long Term Ecological Research project and assisted with adjacent seabird research for the LTER — happily I remain involved with some collaborative projects on the Antarctic Peninsula, even though my career has shifted to other locales. While at Duke, I also assisted colleagues with field projects on the North Carolina coast and out of Seward, AK, with topics including cetacean tagging, seabird monitoring, and remote sensing of biological oceanography. 

After my PhD I accepted a postdoctoral fellowship in "Amazonian remote sensing and wildlife and wildlands conservation" at Wake Forest University, where I conducted research and supported projects across a variety of fields spanning wildlife ecology, drone and satellite remote sensing, and AI and computer vision. The majority of my research was in the lowland Peruvian Amazon of Madre de Dios, where I worked closely with teammates from LinnAerospace Peru to conduct drone flights out of Los Amigos Biological Station and other field sites, surveying wildlife use and occupancy of river-beach habitats and mapping regions of primary and secondary rainforest for various studies of wildlife activity and occupancy. We collaborated with a variety of other teams using camera traps, telemetry methods, and ground-survey techniques, as we develop new methods to integrate spatial dimensions of analysis through remote sensing. We also worked closely and frequently with local colleagues at CINCIA, sharing data and expertise, and occasionally participating in surveys of areas affected by artisanal and small scale gold mining. At Wake Forest University, I was a member of the IRSC research group, which works to bridge pressing conservation topics to computer science solutions using methods from remote sensing, computer vision, and AI.

During this postdoc, our team also piloted new research topics in Piura, Peru, collaborating with local scientists from ecOceánica to develop drone methods for studying the region's whale sharks, sea turtles, and emerging ecotourism industry. The Silman Lab also has ongoing collaborations in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem of Montana, and I briefly joined a team of colleagues from state, federal, NGO, and private affiliations who are exploring opportunities to improve conservation efforts and mitigate wildlife conflict with new technologies. In this region we also used drone methods to map and characterize prehistoric land uses with the help of archaeological experts, shedding light on the deep history of human–wildlife interactions and relationships in this landscape. I have also collaborated on projects throughout North Carolina during my PhD and postdoc years, using drones to support environmental conservation and monitoring efforts, locally, and teaching about drone applications for research and management.

In 2024 I began my current position with the US National Parks Service, Southeast Alaska Inventory & Monitoring Network, where I lead projects studying marine predators and the biological communities that make up the "vital signs" of national parks in our region of Alaska. The position draws on many of my past experiences and the skills I have honed—drone piloting, biological field methods, GIS, coding in R and Python, statistical modeling, computer vision, technical writing, and more. The work is exciting and an exceptional fit for my interests and unique expertise as a wildlife biologist, geospatial scientist, and scientific drone pilot.

Despite my career experience and positive performance evaluations, on February 14, 2025, I was abruptly fired without cause or warning as part of a mass purge of thousands of probationary employees throughout the federal government. After a month, multiple court rulings determined that this was an illegal abuse of the probationary system and, for the time being, I have been reinstated to my position and resumed my duties, which remain mission-critical to the National Park Service and its parks in Southeast Alaska. I am currently navigating an uncertain and tumultuous stage of my career, under a persistent threat of termination by legal and illegal political actions, but I am nevertheless hopeful that I can continue to study, protect, and advocate for wildlife and natural spaces in my personal and professional activities.