About

I am the inaugural social scientist at The Peregrine Fund, a global conservation organization focused on birds of prey. I work on why people interact with nature (especially birds) the way they do, and what drives meaningful and sustainable changes in behavior, rather than just attitudes. Conservation is a particularly interesting collective behavior problem: How should society allocate resources to maintain a complex system, based on limited evidence and conflicting incentives? I apply methods developed outside of conservation, in development economics, public policy, social psychology, and complexity science.

I earned my B.A. in Mathematics with a minor in journalism in 2008, then spent eight years doing a wide variety of things, including a stint as a commercial beekeeper. I went back to school in 2016, earning my PhD in biology at the University of Utah, where I built models to understand the role of information and learning in foraging animals. I then held postdocs at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) and Princeton, where I extended those models and applied them to how people learn from each other and make decisions (details on CV and Research pages).

Raised partly on Pacific islands and partly in the deserts of the Mountain West, I’m at my best when I’m outside — mountaineering, sea kayaking, trekking, paragliding, or roasting my own coffee beans!