I received a B.S. at the University of California, San Diego in 1993 from the Department of Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution and a M.S. in Wildlife Management from Humboldt State University in 1996. For my Master's Thesis, I studied the habitat associations of the threatened Spotted Owl in New Mexico.

I have just completed my third year of Ph.D. work at the University of California, Berkeley and am studying the Marbled Murrelet, an endangered seabird on the central California coast, for my dissertation. The project I am working on was initiated in 1997 by the California Department of Fish and Game and I began working on the project in 1999 under the supervision of Dr. Steven Beissinger for my Ph.D. thesis.

My research to date has focused on endangered species conservation. Because the causes of decline for many endangered species are often complex and difficult to attribute to a single cause, I have developed an interest in variety of disciplines such as genetics, ornithology, mathematical modeling, and oceanography that can be used to shed light on difficult conservation issues such as Marbled Murrelet management.