While growing up the son of a park ranger, my backyards were always open windows on the wilds. My passion for the outdoors grew organically within this milieu, inspiring me from a young age to fill my time with exploration, education, and conservation work. Academically this passion led me through double undergraduate majors in Biology and Environmental Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz, and is now drawing me further to pursue graduate work. Professionally it carried me from my first job on a trail crew, through seven seasons with California State Parks, and beyond to varied conservation projects on the Pacific coast of North America. The most rewarding of these have featured research as an integral component of fieldwork.

I have had the good fortune to work on several seabird colonies, spanning latitudes from central Baja California to the Aleutian Island chain. My focus on seabird colonies has satisfied both the academic and the conservationist in me. With distinct natural boundaries, offshore colonies submit favorably to research methods, often yielding clearly measurable results. Insights gained through their study can, in turn, point the way through broader questions about more complex systems. And as a conservationist, I am heartened that positive changes can appear in colonies soon after the initiation of restoration efforts, generating a welcome sense of accomplishment in a world heavily pressured by anthropogenic forces.

Within the context of the marine environment, island ecology and biogeography, population dynamics, and the influence of El Niño and other large-scale climatic phenomena have all been intriguing subjects to me. I am currently developing a thesis topic with the intention of focusing on aspects of seabird foraging ecology.