I have long been facinated by aquatic ecosystems, and I started my education as an undergraduate student of biological sciences at Clemson University in South Carolina (where I grew up). After finishing my BS in biological sciences, I entered the MS program in aquaculture, fisheries and wildlife at Clemson where my research focused on the life history and ecology of the yellowfin shiner (Notropis lutipinnis). Upon completion of my MS, I entered the PhD program in natural resources at Cornell University where my work focused on studies of relationships between stream communitites and human land uses. Since completing my PhD, my expertise has broadened to include studies of fish, aquatic insects, unionoid clams, and zooplankton in large rivers, inland lakes, and Great Lakes nearshore areas. This expertise is strongly founded on field-based experiments, observations, and surveys to collect data that support my efforts to explore site- and habitat-specific community relationships. I have also used these data to explore relationships between aquatic communities and multi-scale environmental data using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software. My objectives in conducting these studies are to provide greater insight into the ecological mechanisms that support and sustain native biodiversity and to more explicitly identify threats to ecological functions, species persistence, and community stability over multiple spatial scales.

I have a particular interest in using a combination of manipulative field ecological studies and GIS spatial analyses to observe and model responses of aquatic communities to patterns and changes in watershed (streams, rivers, and inland lakes) and shoreline (large rivers and Great Lakes nearshore areas) environmental properties over multiple spatial scales. I am also very interested in the integration of temporal factors into spatially explicit models given the importance of temporally driven events (e.g., migration, reproduction, dispersal, etc.) for determining community structure. Such temporal effects are generally not considered in this type of modeling despite seasonal shifts in community composition and highly variable, temporally inconsistent data resulting from "snapshot" approaches to sampling. I believe that the inclusion of temporal phenomena in such modeling efforts would enrich our understanding of aquatic community patterns and responses to perturbation (natural and anthropogenic) within multi-scale contexts of landscapes. Such understanding can better inform conservation and planning strategies aimed at enhancing the long-term viability of aquatic biodiversity withing existing fragmented landscapes and landscapes that are subject to significant development pressures now and in the future.