Welcome. I am a theoretical, statistical, and computational ecologist at UC Berkeley. My core interests are about how and why ecological populations and communities change through time.

These questions lead me into general research problems about population modeling, data synthesis, and statistical and computational methods. Ecological data often are noisy, vary dramatically through space and time, are subject to imperfect detection or measurement, and may be collected in complicated ways, such as from citizen-science monitoring programs. As a result, there are many math and computing challenges about how to formulate population and community models and fit them to data in order to estimate how species respond to their environment, interact with other species, and change through time.

Over the years, I have been involved in analysis and modeling of birds, mammals, insects, fish, trees, and soil microbiomes. The generality of mathematical and statistical modeling has also brought me into fruitful collaborations on a wider array of topics ranging from agricultural ecology to phytochemical diversity.

A major project in recent years has been co-leading the NIMBLE project for hierarchical statistical modeling in R. This is a general statistical computing tool and is not specific to ecology.