I am the Associate Director of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History and also an Affiliated Professor at the Richard Gilder Graduate School at AMNH and at Columbia University's Dept. of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology. 

I am an interdisciplinary conservation scientist with more than 20 years of field research experience in Latin America, Asia, and the Arctic, and I lead research focused on the impacts of environmental change on biodiversity and human well-being. My research integrates spatial modeling and molecular genetics alongside knowledge from diverse sources and perspectives in a biocultural conservation framework, which explicitly starts with and builds upon local and Indigenous values, knowledge, and needs while recognizing the interplay between the cultural and biological parts of a system. 

I am currently leading two projects funded by NASA, one to support a biodiversity monitoring system for Colombia's Protected Areas, and one to create a pasture degradation monitoring system with Indigenous reindeer herders in the Arctic. I have led related work, also funded by NASA, to expand the open-source species distribution modeling (SDM) software Wallace to facilitate biodiversity observation network assessment and reporting by conservation practitioners. I am a co-author of the open-source release of Maxent, the most commonly used software algorithm for SDM. I also co-lead NSF-funded research on the evolutionary history and conservation of slow lorises and galagos (read more here) using museum conservation genomics (museomics).

You can follow my work on researchgate, or google scholar or learn more about me and my perspective by listening to my story for The Moth.