I'm an Assistant Professor and Bird Curator at the Natural History Museum of Denmark (NHMD) and the Center for Macroecology, Evolution, and Climate (CMEC); at the University of Copenhagen.
I've been interested in birds and nature from a young age, perhaps a consequence of growing up in rural Michigan and spending summers "up north." As a teenager, I developed these interests into a somewhat fanatical birding hobby, which got me out traveling as much as I could manage, learning bird identification, habitats, distributions, behaviors, and the like. For my undergraduate degree I went to Cornell, because, "if you want to study birds, you go to Cornell." I studied Natural Resources and worked on bird research projects in upstate New York and on Hudson Bay, with the intention of working in conservation biology. However, as an undergraduate my research interests shifted towards systematics and evolutionary biology. At this time I also took a interest in preparing specimens and collection-based research. After I graduated, I worked at Cornell for a few months moving the bird collections to the brand new (at the time) Lab of Ornithology building. Afterwards I went on collecting trips for Cornell to Uruguay and Panama. For the next several years (my unofficial "masters" in fieldwork), I worked short-term contract positions during the spring/summer surveying birds for long-term population monitoring projects in Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Louisiana. During fall and winter, I traveled internationally, working as a field hand for research projects in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Malaysian Borneo (collecting birds for Louisiana State University). I also spent time traveling independently (i.e., backpacking) and recording bird vocalizations, over a thousand of which are deposited at Cornell's Macaulay Library. I attended graduate school at the University of Kansas, where I was a student in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the Biodiversity Institute (i.e. the research arm of the KU Natural History Museum). For my dissertation, I studied avian phylogeography in the Philippines. Numerous 'side' projects included phylogenetics of monarchid, muscicapid, and tyrannid flycatchers, trogons, babblers, swifts, and sunbirds. During my time at KU, I spent over a cumulative year leading field expeditions to the Philippines, Peru, and Mongolia. After graduate school, I went on to my first postdoc studying galliform phylogenomics at the University of Florida. After two years there, I took a position with the School for Field Studies, teaching Ecology in their Himalayan Environment and Society in Transition interdisciplinary program in Bhutan, before coming back to the states to refocus on research with a postdoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. Outside of my academic life, I'm into birding, traveling, home aquaria, brewing, and hanging out with my wife Hannah and my cat Meatball. |